>If warming continues at this rate, humanity could breach the Paris Agreement goal of limiting warming to 1.5°C in 2028, even sooner than other research has projected.
I wonder if we are already there :( I remember a year or 2 ago we breached 1.5C for a short period of time.
Crypto mining was bad enough, now with AI and Trump, I expect it will happen sooner then later.
We did this to ourselves. We had ~40 years of warnings but politicians we elected did not want to do any real work for fear of loosing their cushy job were lobbyists do all the work for them.
Both 2023 (probably) and 2024 were over 1.5°C according to Berkeley Earth, 1.54±0.06°C and 1.62±0.06°C respectively. 2025 was (probably) a shade under at 1.44±0.09°C. Unfortunately it looks like that goal won't be attainable, but all the more reason to make the changes we can.
It is not just twice as fast, the pressure to keep rising the rate is still building up. CO2 emissions keeps piling up for centuries, more sea ice is permanently melting, permafrost is thawing at an increasing rate. Positive feedback loops are making that that heating twice as fast happen at shorter periods.
And over that, there are jumps to new higher baselines like with happened in the previous El Niño, and will happen in the incoming monster one.
The Book "Don't think of an Elephant" by George Lakoff covers how the term "climate change" has been pushed by those with a status-quo agenda, to reduce the urgency and engagement with "global warming". The linked article uses both, but global warming more dominantly, including "heating" in the headline.
Imagine an alien with extreme tech capabilities is pointing a heater at the earth. Now react appropriately:
- model and build temperature resistant crops.
- harvest energy from the heat
- create resilience in social governance to enable safer movement of people with education to enable quick adaptation.
- build energy resilience everywhere - including in and especially in desert areas.
- more constructive ideas.
Don’t:
- guilt your children into not having children to “protect the planet” from themselves.
- use your megaphones to racketeer the people making your food into paying you “indulgences” for producing useful stuff for you and other humans (thus making stuff needed by humans more expensive)
- use the problem to gather around with rich friends on fuel-hogging private jets while making others eat less to reduce emissions.
It's worth remembering that "fusion = abundant power" is a guess about technology that hasn't been finished yet. Fusion power might turn out like solar panels (easier to build than expected) or like nuclear fission reactors (harder to build than expected).
The huge energy consumption of the past decades was pushing temperatures up, especially the fastest rise of the mightiest power in history, China (not to blame them though, cudos to them). We have not reached peak everything yet (CO2, energy, steel etc).
We must and we will adapt, if that means renewables, migration or partial extinction. There is no other choice because this is the law of evolution.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 35.4 ms ] threadI wonder if we are already there :( I remember a year or 2 ago we breached 1.5C for a short period of time.
Crypto mining was bad enough, now with AI and Trump, I expect it will happen sooner then later.
We did this to ourselves. We had ~40 years of warnings but politicians we elected did not want to do any real work for fear of loosing their cushy job were lobbyists do all the work for them.
https://berkeleyearth.org/global-temperature-report-for-2023...
https://berkeleyearth.org/global-temperature-report-for-2024...
https://berkeleyearth.org/global-temperature-report-for-2025...
What is the point of this convenience when it really seems to just be making people miserable and isolated?
We're driving off a cliff, and our elected government has a death drive.
The elected government is cashing in through corruption and insider trading at a pace never seen or even imagined before.
Everyone else, is in for a very bad time.
And over that, there are jumps to new higher baselines like with happened in the previous El Niño, and will happen in the incoming monster one.
- model and build temperature resistant crops.
- harvest energy from the heat
- create resilience in social governance to enable safer movement of people with education to enable quick adaptation.
- build energy resilience everywhere - including in and especially in desert areas.
- more constructive ideas.
Don’t:
- guilt your children into not having children to “protect the planet” from themselves.
- use your megaphones to racketeer the people making your food into paying you “indulgences” for producing useful stuff for you and other humans (thus making stuff needed by humans more expensive)
- use the problem to gather around with rich friends on fuel-hogging private jets while making others eat less to reduce emissions.
Discussion then: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47275088
https://realclimatescience.com/2019/12/warming-twice-as-fast
We must and we will adapt, if that means renewables, migration or partial extinction. There is no other choice because this is the law of evolution.