I read an excellent book, The Ends of the World, on just this subject: https://jakeseliger.com/2017/09/18/the-ends-of-the-world-pet.... But the book gets there through looking at the last five mass extinction events. It turns out that either every one of them, or every one except one, hinged on changes in atmospheric carbon levels, which we didn't realize until relatively recently.
Does anyone know if there is any party or even organization anywhere right now pushing proper utilization of the free market to at least internalize the current cost of CO2 emissions (though that by itself could not solve the historical lack). It seems like this would actually be one of the few places where a free market should work extremely well: simply set the price of emitting a ton of CO2 at the ratcheted price (defined by bid) of industrial removal (time period of a day or less) a ton plus some assured margin (7%? exact number could be figured out by experts). The government would serve as the pivot, emitters would pay in units at the existing price, so a pool of credits per ton would collect. Anyone who could meet a minimum volume level (the whole point is massive industrial scale removal) would be able to bid for those in whatever amounts they could handle per day/week/month. If they figured out a new scalable way to remove a ton more cheaply, they'd be able to underbid anyone on a more expensive method and collect the much wider margin until they used up the pool at that price, while meanwhile the price for emitters would automatically be adjusted down to the new cost plus minimum margin. The government might have to get the ball rolling by funding an initial plant, but after that it should be self sustaining, and would it make energy prices directly embody the emission cost in a very clean way that would allow the rest of the economy to locally optimize as necessary.
Obviously there would be many low level implementation details to work through, but this seems obvious enough that I assume it's been proposed many times. However I haven't been able to figure out the right search terms to find any papers developing it further. I've seen plenty of carbon pricing schemes proposed but all of them seem to use pretty arbitrary rates rather then simply directly internalizing the goal of zero net emissions and letting a market on each side sort out how best the meet that goal in any given place. I'd love it if anyone knows where I could better search, after some recent work I do have access to college resources again so academic journals would be fine too. There are also of course plenty of awful schemes by various political parties pushing various subsidies or "efficiency improvements" or whatever in a command-control fashion, but that's not great either. Any HNers who have ideas/sources would be awesome.
We need to price in the externality. A carbon tax is one way to do that. Instead, we have various direct approaches—fuel efficiency standards, subsidies...—that work with varying degrees of success.
The free market has never been used to address global warming (it's badly used in general in fact, possibly in part because few people seem to actually understand what it is or even internalize that it's a tool at all, not an end, and like any tool there are applications it is a poor fit for). Amongst the foundational requirements for a free market to work at all is that the price should embody all costs. There are some problems of course where this simply isn't very practical, particularly ones that are heavily non-linear/non-reversible. But that's not the case for carbon emissions, in fact it's a pretty good fit. The problem is "release of fossil/long term stored carbon into the atmosphere", it's easy to measure at various points at the fuel level, and since it's a gas that will evenly diffuse worldwide and is uniform removal from the atmosphere can take place anywhere in the world by anyone using any method. That makes it well suited to abstraction, with a market system on each side of the equation and government acting as a pivot. Wouldn't even require global buy-in to make a difference given that the energy market is primarily globalized anyway, if a few major polities decided to require it and also made access to their own markets take it into account it'd have a major effect no matter what anyone else wanted.
The free market cannot suitably address the "tragedy of the commons".
If all companies currently follow expensive but environment-friendly processes, a rouge company can undercut them by following a cheaper but environment-harmful process.
This will either force other companies to follow the rogue company, or they go out of business.
"The free market cannot suitably address the "tragedy of the commons"."
You seem to be implicitly saying that property rights cannot be established and enforced, as this is how markets are used to solve such problems. Similar things have been done though, no?
As my ECON 101 teacher said many times, the way to handle negative externalities is to tax them. The free market cannot handle this.
Look at it this way- say you can make a ton of money manufacturing widgets, but you also make a ton of CO2. There is no law against this discharge, so you do it anyway. Climate change might cause you many problems, but it's 50 years or more until you start to personally feel the heat. This is a classic "tragedy of the commons" scenario.
>As my ECON 101 teacher said many times, the way to handle negative externalities is to tax them. The free market cannot handle this.
To take your second part first, taxing is part of the free market. The free market is a creation of and tool for use of government. Regulation to ensure cost internalization, information symmetry, contractual enforcement, and so forth are all basics for it to work at all. And a market has no goals of its own nor does it take into account human floor levels, it's up to society (and in turn its government) to choose goal states and then use all tools to find the most efficient routes towards reaching and then maintaining them.
To go back to the first, you've just restated the question: how do you "tax" the externality? How do you find the right rate? How do you adjust it and account for changing factors? It's government that sets the goal, but government tends to be bad at figuring out implementations and then reacting with high temporal or spatial granularity. In this case we have two linked problems, and we don't care about the "how" at all so long as its within framework requirements, we care about the end of "net zero carbon increase in the atmosphere" (or long term dealing with past emissions, though that'd require taxing other sources). This is exactly the sort of situation that's an ideal fit for using "market" (massively crowd sourced value apportionment utilizing capitalism) to optimize. On the one side is energy generation, which must directly pay per unit for the cost of dealing with their own emissions, and on the other side is finding the ways to most efficiently remove each unit and then collect the money. That would be expected to vary over time and by location, and to feedback into each other (and overall demand/efficiency) via the simple mechanism of price.
I think this is where "liquid democracy" projects like Democracy Earth may be into something. In a way they're seeking to turn government decision making into a market. https://www.democracy.earth
Sounds interesting. The two big barriers to this system are:
1. Political buy-in to set a cost of carbon emission
2. Economic viability of removal (often referred to as carbon capture and storage, or CCS)
1 is non-trivial, but happening. Canada has a provincial carbon tax measure which requires setting a price. A price is also defined in the European cap-and-trade system.
2 is also non-trivial, as the economics are pretty bad right now. However, CCS costs are projected to decrease rapidly. [0]
Right now, integrating CCS is on average more expensive than purchasing carbon credits. Carbon offsetting companies are, to your point, an example of private enterprise filling a gap.
I don't understand what you're saying here, could you clarify? Why would an operation want to be prevented from bidding on collecting the money from carbon removal?
You keep saying "The government" - we have lots of governments, with a lot of variation in how effective and corrupt they are. I'd expect that in total a lot of people would get the permission to exit CO2, a lot of money would be exchanged and somehow very little CO2 would actually be extracted.
Maybe if we had a single "world government" but then the cure (not to the mention the process required to get to that state) might be worse than the disease!
Carbon pricing is a feature of most interpretations of Georgist economics, a model that proposes fees on the industrial consumption of things that are or should be commonly owned (air, water, the radio spectrum, fossil fuels, etc), and redistributing the income. The Alaska Permanent Fund is an example - companies are charged a hefty fee for extracting Alaskan oil, which goes into a trust fund. That trust is then distributed equally to all Alaskan residents.
This is probably a more effective approach than the usual cap-and-trade carbon tax models.
Global warming is real and humans contribute to it. Just stating that so I am not called a 'denier' as I have been before.
That being said, the computer models predicting what the consequences of global warming will be, have greatly over estimated (at least the timeline of) real world impacts. Since I was a kid I've heard in the news that in the next 5 years or 10 years there will be all these catastrophes linked to global warming and I have yet to see them come true.
I remember the BBC reporting years ago that the children of today would only know snow from what they've seen in snow globes, things like that. I think part of the reason for inaction is due to the news media over simplifying the problem and reporting (perhaps even exaggerating) the worst long term predictions.
Yeah the media's bias for sensationalism has really bitten us on the ass on this one. Of course they're going to heavily report anything that can be interpreted as "the world is ending", and now there is a boy who cried wolf effect whenever they report anything on global warming.
The media should be more responsible about this kind of thing.
The numerous one-in-a-thousand-year floods don't get you? The super-typhoons and unprecedented hurricanes? Drought and the human migration motivated by drought and flood? Species extinction? Wildfires? Loss of islands?
I think it was the photos of disinterred coffins floating through the flooded streets of New Orleans that first really hit me: it's here.
Picking a single event like New Orleans isn't great evidence. I lived through a once in 300 years hurricane in southern England in '87 - that tells us nothing.
But the increasing frequency of adverse events and once in a x years events is starting to nod its head in the direction of the impacts of global warming starting to manifest.
The point he made is a good one - media sensationalism, supported by people who should know better; it does more harm than good.
The future looks bleak as we, in the west, can go 100% nuke, zero carbon etc but it's like a fart in a jacuzzi compared to what China will bring as its economy scales to western per-capita size.
To piggyback the above comment, the recent Nature[1] article about centuries-old baobab trees mysteriously dying over the past decade of warmer-then-even-warmer temperatures is what hit me. A potential litmus test for our future as a species.
I suspect we will see more and more accumulation of research on impacts rather than just predicted impacts as we continue to experience increased temperatures. Although you do not have to touch a flame to know it will burn, more and more real world instances of getting "burned" are harder and harder to ignore.
"The researchers found no signs of an epidemic or disease, leading them to suggest that changing climates in southern Africa could be to blame — but they stress that more research is needed to confirm this idea."
As another commenter noted, you're just lucky. There's been once-in-a-x-hundred-year weather events left and right in the past years. We'll see parts of the Carribean become uninhabitable in this generation - especially if the US keeps ignoring e.g. Puerto Rico and Haiti. The big storms will keep hitting those and part of the mainland to a point where the rebuild will not have been finished before the next one hits, forcing people to emigrate inland.
In my situation, temperatures have gone up, with heat records being broken left and right. Used to be we only got like two or three weeks of >30 weather, now it's a multiple of that. You can see it in the sales of AC units and such.
>That being said, the computer models predicting what the consequences of global warming will be, have greatly over estimated (at least the timeline of) real world impacts.
Eh? Models have consistently underestimated the timeline. What exactly random individual articles in the bait-crazy science-ignorant general media may exclaim isn't particularly relevant to the actual state of the science. I mean, you don't read about computer science or bio or whatever stories there, see them get something hilariously wrong, then immediately flip to the next page and take their expertise on some other technical subject as gospel do you? The IPCC reports have been very conservative and used significant error bars. They've even consistently indulged in the fiction that somehow the world would come together and suddenly deal with emissions rather then just letting it run. Interest backed media constantly have played down any possible consequences or flat out asserted it'd be a net positive, that there'd be lots of new farmland say. The old lie of "back in the 70s they said we'd see a new ice age!!" still gets trotted out.
The picture you paint seems the pretty much the polar opposite of the media reality over the last few decades.
As you two have somewhat opposite memories/knowledge on the historical actions of media and science, maybe it'd be good to get some sources out in terms of old reports and articles?
What I'm hearing from scientists is that we're already seeing unusual weather patterns that are due to global warming. For the past decade or so nearly every year has been warmer than the year before, and nearly every year is a record-breaking warm temperature. We're seeing more and more "exceptional" or 1000-year events happening every year. This is what you'd expect from global warming.
Global warming is a slow-moving problem, which humans are terrible at dealing with. It's unfolding over a time span that it hard for humans to perceive in their lifetimes unless they're personally keeping track, and large segments of our population have been trained to distrust scientific reporting.
Per my comment above, we actually just experienced the largest 2-year drop in temp in the last 100 years. The danger with a hugely complex system like "global warming" (i.e. world climate) is that it can be attributed to be the cause of anything.
NASA GISS surface temp data [0]. Feb 2016 to Feb 2018. It's a noteworthy occurrence (and not something the news cycle would pick up) since the focus is always on warming. It certainly doesn't refute the short-term trends present.
Cherry picking 2 data points is not the right way to interpret a trend. 2016 was a spike, but if you look at the trend over the past 20 years (in the data set you linked) it is clear temperature is trending upwards at an accelerating pace.
We'll see how 2018 compares. Look at the chart and you can see that it's not a straight line, it has ups and downs. I see no reason at all to assume that it's trending downward for the next few decades to erase the increase seen over the last century.
The over-sensationalization is purely the media. It's not coming from the models or the scientists running them. Please don't over generalize your anecdotal experience to an entire field. Especially not with something this important.
As for climate disasters, we've had Katrina (2005) - 3rd most intense landfalling storm in the US in 100 years [1], Irma (2017) - the strongest observed in the Atlantic in terms of maximum sustained winds since Wilma [2], Wilma (2005) - the second-most intense tropical cyclone recorded in the Western Hemisphere, after Hurricane Patricia in 2015 [3], Patricia (2015) - the second-most intense tropical cyclone on record worldwide [4], Harvey (2017) - tied with Hurricane Katrina as the costliest tropical cyclone on record[5] - which also caused "500 year floods" (3rd time in 3 years [6]). And that's just a sampling.
For a while now, we've gotten a new "hottest month on record" every few months. And we've pretty consistently gotten "hottest year" on record every few years (increasingly every year or every other year). If you go look at Wunderground's calendar view, you can see the historic temperature records for each day - lows and highs. With few exceptions, the records have all been set in the past few decades. With those records have come any number of record breaking heatwaves, many of which have been very deadly. One of the most recent occurred in Pakistan and saw a temperature of 50.2C (122F) in the city of Nawabshah. [7] Seriously, just google the term "record breaking heatwave" and do some reading.
You may not have experienced the extreme effects over-exaggerating TV anchors talked about in your childhood, but the world is experiencing climate effects as bad as the models predicted, or worse. Please don't use your personal anecdotal experience to undercut the validity of climate models.
> If you go look at Wunderground's calendar view, you can see the historic temperature records for each day - lows and highs. With few exceptions, the records have all been set in the past few decades.
If there were no trend, then there would still be new records established over time, because the longer we keep records for, the more time there is for rare events to occur.
So I think that in order to argue that new records are evidence in favor of a trend, one needs to quantify the likelihood of it not being due to chance somehow.
Media representation is very different from the science.
I fully believe you heard some fantastical reporting when you were a child, but that is a reflection on the journalism, not the science. Overall the modeling has been quite conservative, and has had good accuracy for such domains.
Hmm. Yet snow is becoming rare in UK winters compared to the norm even 30 or 40 years ago, and we've had a succession of warmest November, December, etc on record reports over recent years.
What are you expecting?
Course if the Gulf Stream gets shut down we'll start getting similar snow amounts to Norway
Along a similar vein the rain forests were supposed to have disappeared 10 years ago and I think we were all supposed to suffocate. That’s what I remember hearing as a kid in the 90s.
I wonder what went wrong with those predictions? Did we end up taking enough action to stop that?
Since CO2 is an essential nutrient for the kingdom of plants, the rise in CO2 level has caused land-based vegetation to increase 14% globally over 30 years, and phytoplankton to increase tenfold in the North Atlantic over 50 years.
Since everyone is arguing their beliefs without evidence, and throwing out random storms and climate events as counter-evidence, here are some actual facts:
1. Recent studies on current climate models show they consistently over-predict carbon impact on global warming (source: Nature, Nov 2017: Emission budgets and pathways consistent with limiting warming to 1.5 °C). The article shows that the previous carbon budget was off by a factor of 4 for the next few years, and always predicted higher temps. In other words, the models over-fit the data and thus lose predictive capabilities.
2. Increase/decrease in drought occurrence is inconclusive (Trenberth et al in Nature, 2013):
"Two recent papers looked at the question of whether large-scale drought has been increasing under climate change. A study in Nature by Sheffield et al entitled ‘Little change in global drought over the past 60 years’ was published at almost the same time that ‘Increasing drought under global warming in observations and models’ by Dai appeared in Nature Climate Change (published online in August 2012)."
3. On storms, SREX p. 159:
The present assessment regarding observed trends in tropical cyclone activity is essentially identical to the WMO assessment (Knutson et al., 2010): there is low confidence that any observed long-term (i.e., 40 years or more) increases in tropical cyclone activity are robust, after accounting for past changes in observing capabilities.
4. The greatest two-year cooling event of the last 100 years just occurred in Feb, per GISTEMP Team, 2018: GISS Surface Temperature Analysis data. Global avg temp dropped 0.56 deg C.
Yes, I agree. In the late 70s, it was thought there would be a period of global cooling. Time and Newsweek ran cover stories on the next coming ice age.
Climate change is real, but we have to be more careful about politicizing and forecasting what will happen. The 'imminent danger!' storyline has been played out since the turn of the century (nearly 20 years now) with many failed famous predictions.
To be taken seriously (and it should be) we must be conservative and accurate in prognostications. Further exaggeration is only doing harm.
edit: this is getting downvoted, so perhaps it's a miscommunication. I am most worried about heat waves and disrupted weather patterns causing more common crop failures and the geopolitical stress/conflict that will lead to. You can see the beginnings of this in Syria, Yemen, and various N. African countries where climate change induced drought was the underlying cause for the civic unrest. Look at the migrant populations fleeing these areas. I don't mean anything melodramatic, just that this will be a period of hardship and suffering greater than what we've become accustomed to in recent history.
This article is about the Mid-Miocene Climate Optimum, which was a period of 5 degrees C of warming about 15 million years ago. Another similar event is the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, which was a period of warming (6 degrees C in 20,000 years) about 55 million years ago. The PETM was in response to a massive increase in atmospheric CO2 (several times more than humans have added), though what caused the injection of CO2 is currently unknown. Interestingly, although during the PETM the Earth had no polar ice caps to begin with there was still a rise in sea levels simply due to the thermal expansion of the ocean. There was a great deep dive into the event on the podcast In Our Time by three climatologists: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b08hpmmf
You should note that the PETM CO2 increase was over multiple orders of magnitude (appr. 20,000 year vs 100) and theoretical rate of emission was 1-2 orders of magnitude less than the current rate.
While that's probably true, it's not known for certain what the rate of emission was. 20,000 years is only an upper bound. It's possible that the process that led to the CO2 emissions happened over very short timescales (e.g., a comet impact or volcanic activity). Until we know the process, we can't constrain the rate.
I upvoted you, thank you for replying, but please give me a bit of charity and understand I was replying with the standard geological uncertainties assumed. But my understanding is the best fit is volcanic activity by peat or coal beds over a much longer relative timeframe than current emissions.
A better and much more recent proxy observation for the effect of a warming climate is the Eemian [1] aka the last interglacial. Peak temperature 125k years ago was at least 2 C higher than today, and global sea-level was 8-9 m higher (of which less than 0.5 m is attributable to thermal expansion of ocean water). Scandinavia was an island.
The one big problem I don't see talked about as much for some reason is ocean acidification. Given more of the surface of the planet is covered in ocean than in land, and the influence the oceans have on everything, it's pretty hard not to get worried about it. One consequence that is already happening (partly due to ocean acidification, and partly due to water getting warmer) is coral reef die-offs/bleaching.
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[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 124 ms ] threadObviously there would be many low level implementation details to work through, but this seems obvious enough that I assume it's been proposed many times. However I haven't been able to figure out the right search terms to find any papers developing it further. I've seen plenty of carbon pricing schemes proposed but all of them seem to use pretty arbitrary rates rather then simply directly internalizing the goal of zero net emissions and letting a market on each side sort out how best the meet that goal in any given place. I'd love it if anyone knows where I could better search, after some recent work I do have access to college resources again so academic journals would be fine too. There are also of course plenty of awful schemes by various political parties pushing various subsidies or "efficiency improvements" or whatever in a command-control fashion, but that's not great either. Any HNers who have ideas/sources would be awesome.
FTFY
2. The market pulling billions of people out of poverty is probably the opposite of failure.
If all companies currently follow expensive but environment-friendly processes, a rouge company can undercut them by following a cheaper but environment-harmful process. This will either force other companies to follow the rogue company, or they go out of business.
You seem to be implicitly saying that property rights cannot be established and enforced, as this is how markets are used to solve such problems. Similar things have been done though, no?
Look at it this way- say you can make a ton of money manufacturing widgets, but you also make a ton of CO2. There is no law against this discharge, so you do it anyway. Climate change might cause you many problems, but it's 50 years or more until you start to personally feel the heat. This is a classic "tragedy of the commons" scenario.
To take your second part first, taxing is part of the free market. The free market is a creation of and tool for use of government. Regulation to ensure cost internalization, information symmetry, contractual enforcement, and so forth are all basics for it to work at all. And a market has no goals of its own nor does it take into account human floor levels, it's up to society (and in turn its government) to choose goal states and then use all tools to find the most efficient routes towards reaching and then maintaining them.
To go back to the first, you've just restated the question: how do you "tax" the externality? How do you find the right rate? How do you adjust it and account for changing factors? It's government that sets the goal, but government tends to be bad at figuring out implementations and then reacting with high temporal or spatial granularity. In this case we have two linked problems, and we don't care about the "how" at all so long as its within framework requirements, we care about the end of "net zero carbon increase in the atmosphere" (or long term dealing with past emissions, though that'd require taxing other sources). This is exactly the sort of situation that's an ideal fit for using "market" (massively crowd sourced value apportionment utilizing capitalism) to optimize. On the one side is energy generation, which must directly pay per unit for the cost of dealing with their own emissions, and on the other side is finding the ways to most efficiently remove each unit and then collect the money. That would be expected to vary over time and by location, and to feedback into each other (and overall demand/efficiency) via the simple mechanism of price.
1. Political buy-in to set a cost of carbon emission 2. Economic viability of removal (often referred to as carbon capture and storage, or CCS)
1 is non-trivial, but happening. Canada has a provincial carbon tax measure which requires setting a price. A price is also defined in the European cap-and-trade system.
2 is also non-trivial, as the economics are pretty bad right now. However, CCS costs are projected to decrease rapidly. [0]
Right now, integrating CCS is on average more expensive than purchasing carbon credits. Carbon offsetting companies are, to your point, an example of private enterprise filling a gap.
[0] http://www.ccsassociation.org/why-ccs/affordability/
Just shard your operation so that no one "company" exceeds that level.
My thought was that you'd have to be over N volume of CO2 emissions to have a mandated payment.
Maybe if we had a single "world government" but then the cure (not to the mention the process required to get to that state) might be worse than the disease!
This is probably a more effective approach than the usual cap-and-trade carbon tax models.
(nitpick: s/the free market/market mechanisms/ - free market implies lack of regulation and government involvement)
That being said, the computer models predicting what the consequences of global warming will be, have greatly over estimated (at least the timeline of) real world impacts. Since I was a kid I've heard in the news that in the next 5 years or 10 years there will be all these catastrophes linked to global warming and I have yet to see them come true.
I remember the BBC reporting years ago that the children of today would only know snow from what they've seen in snow globes, things like that. I think part of the reason for inaction is due to the news media over simplifying the problem and reporting (perhaps even exaggerating) the worst long term predictions.
The media should be more responsible about this kind of thing.
I think it was the photos of disinterred coffins floating through the flooded streets of New Orleans that first really hit me: it's here.
Picking a single event like New Orleans isn't great evidence. I lived through a once in 300 years hurricane in southern England in '87 - that tells us nothing.
But the increasing frequency of adverse events and once in a x years events is starting to nod its head in the direction of the impacts of global warming starting to manifest.
The point he made is a good one - media sensationalism, supported by people who should know better; it does more harm than good.
The future looks bleak as we, in the west, can go 100% nuke, zero carbon etc but it's like a fart in a jacuzzi compared to what China will bring as its economy scales to western per-capita size.
I suspect we will see more and more accumulation of research on impacts rather than just predicted impacts as we continue to experience increased temperatures. Although you do not have to touch a flame to know it will burn, more and more real world instances of getting "burned" are harder and harder to ignore.
"The researchers found no signs of an epidemic or disease, leading them to suggest that changing climates in southern Africa could be to blame — but they stress that more research is needed to confirm this idea."
[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-05411-7
In my situation, temperatures have gone up, with heat records being broken left and right. Used to be we only got like two or three weeks of >30 weather, now it's a multiple of that. You can see it in the sales of AC units and such.
Eh? Models have consistently underestimated the timeline. What exactly random individual articles in the bait-crazy science-ignorant general media may exclaim isn't particularly relevant to the actual state of the science. I mean, you don't read about computer science or bio or whatever stories there, see them get something hilariously wrong, then immediately flip to the next page and take their expertise on some other technical subject as gospel do you? The IPCC reports have been very conservative and used significant error bars. They've even consistently indulged in the fiction that somehow the world would come together and suddenly deal with emissions rather then just letting it run. Interest backed media constantly have played down any possible consequences or flat out asserted it'd be a net positive, that there'd be lots of new farmland say. The old lie of "back in the 70s they said we'd see a new ice age!!" still gets trotted out.
The picture you paint seems the pretty much the polar opposite of the media reality over the last few decades.
Global warming is a slow-moving problem, which humans are terrible at dealing with. It's unfolding over a time span that it hard for humans to perceive in their lifetimes unless they're personally keeping track, and large segments of our population have been trained to distrust scientific reporting.
https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/global-temperature/
It seems some years are cooler than others, but the general trend is upwards.
I don't see where the last two years indicate much of a temperature drop. Do you have a source of information for your statement?
https://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/
While 2017 was slightly cooler than the year preceding, it was the second hottest year since global temperature records began in 1880.
From the same page you linked. https://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/news/20180118/
We'll see how 2018 compares. Look at the chart and you can see that it's not a straight line, it has ups and downs. I see no reason at all to assume that it's trending downward for the next few decades to erase the increase seen over the last century.
The models have consistently undershot the mark: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/climate-science-p...
As for climate disasters, we've had Katrina (2005) - 3rd most intense landfalling storm in the US in 100 years [1], Irma (2017) - the strongest observed in the Atlantic in terms of maximum sustained winds since Wilma [2], Wilma (2005) - the second-most intense tropical cyclone recorded in the Western Hemisphere, after Hurricane Patricia in 2015 [3], Patricia (2015) - the second-most intense tropical cyclone on record worldwide [4], Harvey (2017) - tied with Hurricane Katrina as the costliest tropical cyclone on record[5] - which also caused "500 year floods" (3rd time in 3 years [6]). And that's just a sampling.
For a while now, we've gotten a new "hottest month on record" every few months. And we've pretty consistently gotten "hottest year" on record every few years (increasingly every year or every other year). If you go look at Wunderground's calendar view, you can see the historic temperature records for each day - lows and highs. With few exceptions, the records have all been set in the past few decades. With those records have come any number of record breaking heatwaves, many of which have been very deadly. One of the most recent occurred in Pakistan and saw a temperature of 50.2C (122F) in the city of Nawabshah. [7] Seriously, just google the term "record breaking heatwave" and do some reading.
You may not have experienced the extreme effects over-exaggerating TV anchors talked about in your childhood, but the world is experiencing climate effects as bad as the models predicted, or worse. Please don't use your personal anecdotal experience to undercut the validity of climate models.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Katrina [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Irma [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Wilma [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Patricia [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Harvey [6] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/08/29/houst... [7] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/may/02/pakistani-city...
> If you go look at Wunderground's calendar view, you can see the historic temperature records for each day - lows and highs. With few exceptions, the records have all been set in the past few decades.
How long have we been tracking these records?
So I think that in order to argue that new records are evidence in favor of a trend, one needs to quantify the likelihood of it not being due to chance somehow.
I fully believe you heard some fantastical reporting when you were a child, but that is a reflection on the journalism, not the science. Overall the modeling has been quite conservative, and has had good accuracy for such domains.
What are you expecting?
Course if the Gulf Stream gets shut down we'll start getting similar snow amounts to Norway
I wonder what went wrong with those predictions? Did we end up taking enough action to stop that?
1. Recent studies on current climate models show they consistently over-predict carbon impact on global warming (source: Nature, Nov 2017: Emission budgets and pathways consistent with limiting warming to 1.5 °C). The article shows that the previous carbon budget was off by a factor of 4 for the next few years, and always predicted higher temps. In other words, the models over-fit the data and thus lose predictive capabilities.
2. Increase/decrease in drought occurrence is inconclusive (Trenberth et al in Nature, 2013): "Two recent papers looked at the question of whether large-scale drought has been increasing under climate change. A study in Nature by Sheffield et al entitled ‘Little change in global drought over the past 60 years’ was published at almost the same time that ‘Increasing drought under global warming in observations and models’ by Dai appeared in Nature Climate Change (published online in August 2012)."
3. On storms, SREX p. 159: The present assessment regarding observed trends in tropical cyclone activity is essentially identical to the WMO assessment (Knutson et al., 2010): there is low confidence that any observed long-term (i.e., 40 years or more) increases in tropical cyclone activity are robust, after accounting for past changes in observing capabilities.
4. The greatest two-year cooling event of the last 100 years just occurred in Feb, per GISTEMP Team, 2018: GISS Surface Temperature Analysis data. Global avg temp dropped 0.56 deg C.
Climate change is real, but we have to be more careful about politicizing and forecasting what will happen. The 'imminent danger!' storyline has been played out since the turn of the century (nearly 20 years now) with many failed famous predictions.
To be taken seriously (and it should be) we must be conservative and accurate in prognostications. Further exaggeration is only doing harm.
edit: this is getting downvoted, so perhaps it's a miscommunication. I am most worried about heat waves and disrupted weather patterns causing more common crop failures and the geopolitical stress/conflict that will lead to. You can see the beginnings of this in Syria, Yemen, and various N. African countries where climate change induced drought was the underlying cause for the civic unrest. Look at the migrant populations fleeing these areas. I don't mean anything melodramatic, just that this will be a period of hardship and suffering greater than what we've become accustomed to in recent history.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eemian