Guest essay by Eric Worrall
According to a new study, preventing global warming from exceeding United Nations targets of 1.5 ° C or even 2 ° C no longer makes sense – although we should stop CO2 emissions immediately to slow them down.
Global warming that has already been burned in will exceed climate targets, according to a new study
BY SETH BORENSTEIN / AP JANUARY 4, 2021 11:23 PM EST
The extent of burned-in global warming from carbon pollution already in the air is sufficient to exceed internationally agreed targets to limit climate change, according to a new study.
But it’s not game over, because while this warming can be inevitable, it can be delayed for centuries if the world quickly stops emitting additional greenhouse gases from burning coal, oil, and natural gas, the study authors say.
For decades, scientists have been talking about what is known as “fixed warming,” or the rise in future temperature due to past carbon dioxide emissions that have remained in the atmosphere for well over a century. It’s like the distance a fast moving car travels after braking.
However, the study from Monday in the journal Nature Climate Change calculates this a little differently and now assumes that the carbon pollution that is already in the air has raised global temperatures to around 2.3 degrees Celsius (4.1 degrees Fahrenheit) since pre-industrial times will drift.
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Just because the world is inevitably warming up more than international goals does not mean that everything is lost in the fight against global warming, said Dessler, who warned of what he called a “climate doomer”.
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Read more: https://time.com/5926319/global-warming-climate-goals/
The abstract of the study;
Stronger heating after taking into account the pattern effect
Chen Zhou, Mark D. Zelinka, Andrew E. Dessler, and Minghuai Wang
abstract
The energy balance of our planet is sensitive to spatial inhomogeneities in the sea surface temperature and changes in sea ice. However, this is usually ignored in climate projections. Here we show that the energy budget of the last few decades can be closed by combining changes in effective radiative forcing, linear radiation attenuation, and this pattern effect. The pattern effect is of comparable magnitude, but opposite of the sign of the Earth’s net energy imbalance in the 2000s, indicating its importance in predicting future climates based on observations. After the pattern effect has been taken into account, the best possible value of the committed global warming increases with today’s forcing from 1.31 K (0.99–2.33 K, 5th – 95th percentile) to over 2 K and the fixed warming in the year 2100 constant length – forced forcing increases from 1.32 K (0.94-2.03 K) to over 1.5 K, although the magnitude is sensitive to the sea surface temperature data set. Further restrictions on the pattern effect are needed to reduce the uncertainty of the climate projection.
Read more (paywalled): https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-020-00955-x
Unfortunately, the full study is chargeable, but I think we got the idea.
I have to say that I am a little disappointed. How long do we have to wait until there is no more hope and the Greens give up pushing us to build renewable energies? I was hoping that once the Greens believed global warming was on track to overcome 2C, they would declare the game over. But they still find reasons to demand compliance.
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