Earth is on track to exceed 1.5C warming in the next decade, study using AI finds

[Uncle Joe]

(snip)

Utilizing a neural network, or a type of AI that recognizes relationships in vast sets of data, the scientists trained the system to analyze a wide array of global climate model simulations and then asked it to determine timelines for given temperature thresholds.

The model found a nearly 70% chance that the two-degree threshold would be crossed between 2044 and 2065, even if emissions rapidly decline. To check the AI’s prediction prowess, they also entered historical measurements and asked the system to evaluate current levels of heating already noted. Using data from 1980 to 2021, the AI passed the test, correctly homing in on both the 1.1C warming reached by 2022 and the patterns and pace observed in recent decades.

The two temperature benchmarks, outlined as crisis points by the United Nations Paris agreement, produce vastly different outcomes across the world. The landmark pact, signed by nearly 200 countries, pledged to keep heating well below two degrees and recognized that aiming for 1.5C “would significantly reduce the risks and impacts of climate change”.

Half a degree of heating may not seem like a lot, but the increased impacts are exponential, intensifying a broad scale of consequences for ecosystems around the world, and the people, plants and animals that depend on them. Just a fraction of a degree of warming would increase the number of summers the Arctic would be ice-free tenfold, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a global consortium of scientists founded to assess climate change science for the UN. The difference between 1.5C and 2C also results in twice the amount of lost habitat for plants and three times the amount for insects.

(snip)

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jan/30/climate-crisis-global-heating-artificial-intelligence

[mahina]

1. Considering we e already warmed 1.9 I don't know how they arrived at the number

[IbogaProject]

3. Window dressing

The number is in Celsius not Fahrenheit it is the warming above the 1880-1910 average. Here is a blog by a Rutgers Professor under a pseudonym http://arctic-news.blogspot.com/2023/01/the-global-climate-change-suicide-pact.html?m=1

[mahina]

4. Thank you, but I'm not clicking the link to anything by anybody writing under a pseudonym

There’s plenty of good science. I’d be very happy to read your four paragraphs summary. Sometimes I am aware that I’m missing things because I’m leery of links that are unknown by unknown authors. I am interested in reading the material, though, aware of and not in a position to afford much extra risk. Taking on quite a fair amount on my own already. What does it say? Please copy 4 para. Thanks heaps.

I’m guessing the summary is we are fucked unless I hear otherwise but I will say it’s not all hopeless out there

[IbogaProject]

6. The issue is dyre

The most recent post there https://arctic-news.blogspot.com/2023/01/the-global-climate-change-suicide-pact.html
is actually by a named scientist from Australia, the American Scientist has had to use a pseudonym to reduce the MAGA harassment. There has been extensive research over the last 15-20 years that has show that the extreme mass extinction climate shifts, the largest total about 5 or 6 over last few hundred million years often happen in a rapid 12-15 year span. Even the smaller shifts into and out of our more recent ice-ages happen in an about 12 year time frame. The final issue is the temperature and co2 are increasing at the fasted rate in geologic history. Here is the post that I linked above, the pictures only come up in that post and I couldn't figure how to copy them.

The global climate change suicide pact
by Andrew Glikson

Despite of deceptively-claimed mitigation of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in parts of the world, ongoing burning of domestic and exported fossil fuels world-wide continues to change the composition of the atmosphere, enriching it in greenhouse gases by yet another ~2 ppm CO₂ (2022: 418.95 ppm; CH₄: 1915 ppb; N₂0: 337 ppb), reaching levels commensurate with those of the Miocene (23.03 to 5.333 Ma) at rise rates exceeding any in the geological record of the last 66 million years (Glikson, 2020) (Figure 1).


Figure 1. Global 1880-2021 annual average temperatures (adapted by UCAR from ClimateCentral).

Since 1880 mean global temperatures rose at a rate of 0.08°C per decade, from 1981 by 0.18°C per decade and more when emitted aerosols are accounted for (Hansen et al., in Berwyn, 2022). According to Will Steffen, Australia’s leading climate scientist “there was already a chance we have triggered a global tipping cascade that would take us to a less habitable Hothouse Earth climate, regardless of whether we reduced emissions” (Figure 2).


Figure 2. Global mean temperature profile since 200 AD projected to beyond 2000 AD (Will Steffen)

Over a brief span of less than two centuries (Figure 1) anthropogenic reversal of the carbon cycle induced the emission of some 1.5 10¹² tonnes of CO₂ and an increased release of 150% more CH₄ from the crust, accumulated in sediments for hundreds of million years through photosynthesis and calcification, as well as from permafrost and oceans. Permeation of the atmosphere and the hydrosphere with the toxic residues of ancient plants and organisms, poisoning the biosphere, is leading to the Sixth mass extinction of species in the history of nature.

Following failed attempts to deny climate science, vested business and political interests are proceeding, with the support of many governments, to mine coal, sink oil wells and frack hydrocarbon gas, regardless of the consequences in term of global heating, sea level rise, inundation of islands and coastal zones, collapse of the permafrost, heat waves, floods, ocean acidification, migration of climate zones and dissemination of plastic particles, rendering the future of much of the biosphere uninhabitable.


Figure 3. Europe: Maximum extreme temperatures, July 17-23, 2002.

The progression of global warming is unlikely to be linear as the flow of cold ice melt water from Greenland and Antarctica glaciers would cool parts of the ocean and in part the continents (Figure 4), leading toward a stadial-type phenomenon, the classic case of which is symbolized by the Younger dryas cool period 12,900 to 11,700 years ago.


Figure 4. Projected transient stadial cooling events (Hansen et al., 2016)

National and international legal systems appear unable to restrict the saturation of the atmosphere with greenhouse gases, as governments preside over the worst calamity in natural history since the demise of the dinosaurs. Facing heatwaves (Figure 3), fires, floods and sea level rise, those responsible may in part remain oblivious to the magnitude of the consequences, waking up when it is too late.

There was a time when leaders fell on their sword when defeated in battle or lose their core beliefs, nowadays most not even resign their privileged positions to resist the existential danger posed to advanced life, including human civilization, preoccupied as nations are with preparations for nuclear wars.

It is long past time to declare a global climate and nuclear emergency.



Andrew Glikson
A/Prof. Andrew Glikson

Earth and Paleo-climate scientist
School of Biological, Earth and Environmental Sciences
The University of New South Wales,
Kensington NSW 2052 Australia

[bucolic_frolic]

2. Locales will be frying by 2035

Exponential growth, do-nothing politicians, throttle up the good times mentality of the public all point to rapid breach of climate targets. I'm not AI though. So don't listen to me.

[mahina]

5. Likely but avoidable even now.

[ancianita]

7. Once we go hit that 2 degree Celsius door, Uncle Joe, humanity is truly fucked.