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When I was younger, I remember thinking, "a few degrees, what difference does that make?" Then when I grew older I realised that in Climate science a few degree

by lbriner 23d ago

When I was younger, I remember thinking, "a few degrees, what difference does that make?" Then when I grew older I realised that in Climate science a few degrees is the difference between survival and annihilation. A few degrees warmer in the ocean and El Niño becomes an incredible problem for half the world. I am glad that I live far away from the effects but it is sad to think of people losing all kinds of things for the lack of respect of Mother Earth!

toomuchtodo 23d ago
“Climate change will manifest as a series of disasters viewed through phones with footage that gets closer and closer to where you live until you're the one filming it.” You cannot outrun agriculture and crop failures, infrastructure failures, insurance costs accelerating to properly price the risk, wild fires, etc. US cattle herds are at record lows from climate related input costs. Romanian, Hungarian, and Bulgarian nuclear reactors no longer have enough water to operate. The Colorado River Basin will only continue to dry out. And so on. Some will be impacted more than others, but everyone will feel some impact, and it potentially will only worsen over time. If you believe in climate change, do your best to mitigate the impact for the remainder of your lifetime. If you don't believe, oh well, good luck. https://x.com/ZackBornstein/status/1877055187241594986 https://x.com/ZackBornstein/status/1877055187241594986 Londoners Find ‘Horrendous’ Cracks in Their Homes After Successive Heat Waves - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-08-23/londoners-find-horrendous-cracks-in-homes-after-heat-waves https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-08-23/londoners... | https://archive.today/koMaT https://archive.today/koMaT - August 23rd, 2026 > “The impact that climate change is having is undeniable.” -- Laura Hughes, Head of general insurance at the Association of British Insurers. > 20%-25%: The average property devaluation as a result of subsidence, according to the Federation of Master Builders The Age of Unstoppable Wildfires Has Reached Europe - https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2026-europe-summer-wildfires/ https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2026-europe-summer-wildfi... | https://archive.today/OjDZH https://archive.today/OjDZH - July 30th, 2026 Climate Change Is Already Showing Up in the Cost of Living - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-04-24/climate-change-is-already-making-the-affordability-crisis-worse https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-04-24/climate-c... | https://archive.today/EYTqo https://archive.today/EYTqo - April 24th, 2026 Heat Strains US Power Grids That Need Off-Season Repairs - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-05-19/rising-heat-strains-us-power-grid-in-need-of-off-season-repairs https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-05-19/rising-he... | https://archive.today/K9VF0 https://archive.today/K9VF0 - May 19th, 2026 US Spending on Climate Damage Nears $1 Trillion Per Year - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-06-17/us-spending-on-climate-damage-nears-1-trillion-per-year https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-06-17/us-spendi... | https://archive.today/9IJWo https://archive.today/9IJWo - June 17th, 2025 (Texas night time temps are staying high enough [~78F] that the utility equipment does not get time to cool off and cycle, leading to more faults, for example, and the manufacturing supply chain for transformers has a backlog measured in years)
- Forgeties79 23d ago
  Even the US military treats climate change as not only real but as a destabilizing threat. What other endorsement could one possibly need?
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  - lbriner 23d ago
    "Yeah but they would say that, they are part of the system" Sadly, there is no way to counter a conspiracy theorist because if you question or counter then you are just part of the conspiracy too. Governments know that they need to do stuff but they also know that ignorant voters who read trash tabloid newspapers will vote them out next time because they might have to pay a little more for their electricity or cars.
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  - ColdStream 23d ago
    The US Military hit it right on the head. Climate change is a risk multiplier. It takes already potentially big issues and makes them so much worse.
  - _djo_ 23d ago
    It used to. The deeply ideological current administration has decreed that it may no longer do so, and must instead pretend that climate change doesn't exist. [0][1] [0] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/oct/14/pentagon-military-climate-crisis-trump https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/oct/14/pentagon... [1] https://www.eenews.net/articles/pentagon-starts-purging-climate-change-crap/ https://www.eenews.net/articles/pentagon-starts-purging-clim...
    - Forgeties79 22d ago
      Say what you want about the military, I think most of the adults in the room, however many are left, are simply treating the threat is real even if they won’t explicitly say it. Doesn’t mean there isn’t a chilling effect, but also, not everybody is the DEI hire Hegseth.
larsfaye 23d ago
>I am glad that I live far away from the effects Are you not on planet earth? Unless you're on Mars, you're not far away from any effects.
- ceejayoz 23d ago
  There are regions on the planet that will likely fare better than others, though.
  - bix6 23d ago
    Not for long.
  - mullingitover 23d ago
    And we can tell ourselves that those regions which fare better will be left entirely alone. No one is going to, say, kill all the inhabitants and take the land from them.
    - hackable_sand 23d ago
      You can't own land, so that solves that issue.
  - consumer451 23d ago
    Maybe you will require less insulation reconfiguration than some other regions, but it will be hard to escape the effects of billions of people suffering. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polycrisis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polycrisis edit: To be clear, I still think there is time to react, and stop the worst impacts. We just need to get way off the rails of the route that we are currently on. If we put half of the heroic engineering + global capital that we put into fossil fuel extraction into better things, we could get most of the way to the goal. Fossil fuel extraction is like many simultaneous Manhattan Projects. It's nuts what we put into that. Would be super cool if some of the breakout sessions titled "surviving WW III," were replaced by "avoiding WW III."
  - Muromec 23d ago
jimt1234 23d ago
This is exactly what I hear from my MAGA relatives: Why should I care if the ocean rises a few inches? I don't own beachfront property in Florida.
- kenhwang 23d ago
  From what we've seen, so far the (not projected to be underwater) coastal areas might be the areas spared in this scenario too, because being by the water still moderates temperature swings. It's everywhere else that'll be getting record breaking heat/drought and snow, which have been far more damaging. The disaster radius of hurricanes reaches far more inland than just the coast.
- ElProlactin 23d ago
  Your relatives clearly aren't MAGA if they're not concerned about what rising sea levels will do to Mar-a-Lago.
  - Terr_ 23d ago
    Careful, that's a pitfall there if we assume MAGA words reflect an internal belief system. Too often the words are whatever they have to say in order to secure continued membership in the group: The Emperor's New Clothes are a glorious blue today. P.S: Also, we have always been [about to start|recently victorious] in the [illegal war|undeclared "excursion"] against Irania, and the tariff-free chocolate ration has been raised to twenty grammes per week.
  - ColdStream 23d ago
    You know we might just be seeing the starting seed of the future legend of the Merica Atlantis. The fabled sunken land of Mar-a-lago where the King in Orange's folly took his treasures to the dark depths. Although after a few hundred years and many verbal re-tellings it might be the forgotten lands of Margaritaville. King Trump was a fan of a Cheeseburger in paradise. ;)
- twothreeone 23d ago
  I mean they're right, rising oceans will be a drop in the bucket for the majority of us. Unless we act together, human civilization will end through the combination of breakdown of global trade, mass migration due to heat and resource wars, and collapse of our food chain. Ocean levels are just one of the side effects that goes along with rising global temperatures. Beef production in the US is already down from 30 years ago. At some point you won't be able to raise cows anywhere, less alone feed them. Corn and wheat have seen tremendous fluctuations in the past and will likely continue to fall. Imagine corn yields dropping by more than 80% in the US [1]. Of course MAGA people will probably only notice once the shelves aren't being restocked. [1] https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.0906865106 https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.0906865106
triska 23d ago
> "a few degrees, what difference does that make?" Maybe this helps: Think about when we have a fever of "a few degrees", say, instead of 37 degree Celsius, we have 40. It shows that also a few degrees can make a huge difference.
- charcircuit 23d ago
  The temperature of a fever is not measuring the temperature outside.
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  - groby_b 23d ago
    This may be hard to understand, but that was an illustrative example on why sometimes a few degree difference have bigger absolute impact than you'd expect from the purely numerical value. Nobody (well, almost nobody, I guess) considered it an explanation or model of climate change.
    - deleted 23d ago
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    - charcircuit 22d ago
      It's like saying the sea level's altitude is important because if a drone assumes it is off by a few meters it can crash into the ground. It ignores that the altitude of a drone is based off of the output of a control system. If you just ignore the control system and adjust the altitude of the drone to the point where it crashes it is just ignoring what happens in reality and is not representative of what is trying to be discussed.
- Isaackoz 23d ago
  Think even bigger. 1 degrees inside your house? Not noticeable at all. But on a planet-wide scale? A 1 degree difference requires a LOT of energy. It's like boiling a cup of water vs an Olympic sized swimming pool. The latter is going to take a lot more energy than the former.
wcfrobert 23d ago
It's like interest rates. I used to think it's weird why people are so obsessed with a couple percentage points. But it's turns out those couple of percent could mean hundreds of thousands of dollars difference for a 30 year mortgage
yodsanklai 23d ago
> A few degrees warmer in the ocean and El Niño becomes an incredible problem for half the world. Ice age was only 6 degrees less than now, half of Europe was under ice
- Windchaser 23d ago
  And when the Earth was 3C cooler, NYC was nearly under an ice sheet. The current estimate is that we're heading for +3C warmer, which is gonna have some big impacts.
  - ColdStream 23d ago
    Not only are we heading there it might be a lot quicker than we anticipate. The warming is accelerating quickly as the CO2 is cumulative and the feed back loops get more intense. The last decade has seen a 0.48c increase in temperature and due to the decade base line shifting every year and it is increasing in pace. https://www.intelligentliving.co/global-warming-acceleration-2026/ https://www.intelligentliving.co/global-warming-acceleration... The more realistic climate scientists think we will blow past 2c by roughly 2035. We are on track to 3c by 2050 and emissions growth has yet to stop despite all the additional renewables being built. This is why many have said next year with the flow on effects of El Nino that we will be getting a preview of 2035.
    - Windchaser 23d ago
      > The more realistic climate scientists think we will blow past 2c by roughly 2035. We are on track to 3c by 2050 I keep hearing this, but not from the climate science community, but from laypeople. I don't understand it. I haven't yet heard reasonable physical mechanisms that would push us past 3C by 2050, when the mean expectation from major models is still ~2.7C by 2100. We haven't even hit 1.5C yet, not as a running decadal-ish average, using "1.5C target" the way that climate scientists traditionally meant it. How are we going to add another 1.5C in the next 25 years? That'd require 0.65C/decade. I don't understand it. The math ain't mathin'. For what it's worth, the link you cite talks about the reasons for the acceleration. But some of those reasons (El Nino, aerosols) lead to one-off pops that don't translate to higher long-term trends. Meaning, it would be reasonable to guess that the recent acceleration will taper off some, and we'll head back towards 0.2 - 0.25 C/decade from the current 0.35C/decade. But even if we keep up the current 0.35C/decade, we aren't getting to +3C until ~2075.
cameldrv 23d ago
Honestly I think American scientists not speaking in Fahrenheit units to an American audience is an incredibly simple and stupid, but very significant cause of the problem. If I tell you the Earth is going to get 2 degrees C warmer, Americans are going to think, "2 degrees, not that much, barely noticeable." If you tell them it's 4 degrees F, they'll think, that's not a ton, but it's definitely noticeable.
- N_Lens 23d ago
  I like the 30 year mortgage analogy, something people can connect with. 2% increase in mortgage rate likely means low 6 figures difference in total interest paid.
giarc 23d ago
I fell in the same trap "So it'll be 25C in summer instead of 23C!". Sometimes it's small things that make you realize how small changes make big impacts. For example, I was watching a documentary about caribou in Northern Canada. A whole herd starved and died because of a slight warming during winter. Normally they dig through the snow to find food in the winter. But a slight warming meant the snow fell as freezing rain and left a thick layer of ice on top of the snow. The caribou couldn't dig through it and therefore couldn't eat and they died. A tiny change in temperature wiped out a huge colony.
cmrdporcupine 23d ago
> I am glad that I live far away from the effects but it is sad to think of people losing all kinds of things for the lack of respect of Mother Earth! I thought this too, feeling a bit more smug living in southern Ontario, safer than my family in BC and Alberta next to raging forest fires and potential drought. But seems we now get a few weeks of forest fire smoke every year even down here in lush green great lakes land. And the number of tornadoes and ice storms seem to increase every year. Plus watching the Children of Men style xenophobia and callous disregard for climate refugees set in all over the world. Blech. I love my kids but I think my perspective would be much different and positive if I'd just remained childless.
- TacticalCoder 23d ago
  > Plus watching the Children of Men style xenophobia and callous disregard for climate refugees set in all over the world. There are no climate refugees... Yet.
  - infinite8s 22d ago
    The collapse of Syria was partly due to an extended drought causing famine. A lot of the current xenophobia in Europe is due to the small amount of refugees escaping the effects of this famine and subsequent civil war.
- ColdStream 23d ago
  Cortisol is the hormone that creates tight social bonds. It is what make you love your kids so much. So the secret to a loving and kind society is to just pour this stuff in the drinking water supply, right? No it strengthened social bonds, both toward family and friends and equally against others. It makes people VERY tribal. Cortisol is also released in long term stressful situations. With a rising tide of poverty and climate blow back, I suspect stress will increase and so too will said tribalism. What we see today with the rising popularist and isolationist political parties is but an echo of the future. We see some of these tendencies when a few thousand or tens of thousands of refugees turn up in a country. What happens when this becomes millions? I have said it for years, many will be welcomed with open arms - those arms being machine guns, bombs and drones. This is the dark future I fear and I hope I am wrong. I do not have kids, it wasn't by choice. But what looked like something of a negative might actually turn out to be a near miss in future. Just keep your kids safe and try to have peace and compassion to others that are trying to do the same.
fragmede 23d ago
It's a marketing copy thing. If instead of 1 degree, they said 1.4 million TWh, which is the amount of energy needed to heat the Earth by 1 degree, it would hit better extreme number emotional buttons, but I'm not in charge of things.
- stouset 23d ago
  Frankly I think expressing it in Celsius has made Americans think it’s less of a problem than it is. It took me awhile to realize that it’s basically 4°F, which is enormous.
ColdStream 23d ago
Someone I know who worked in the climate sciences once put it so clearly to me. An increase of 1 degree is global, and with 70% of the world being ocean that raises much slower, the temperature rise over land is effectively doubled. So 1c degree is 2c. A 2c world is 4c. That when CO2 was 100 point less than the 280ppm baseline we had an ice age with glaciers down to the 40th(ish) parallels in the Northern Hemisphere. We have now pushed it 150 above the baseline in effectively 150 years and fast accelerating. What seems like something trivial, is actually forcing on an unbelievable scale. Also a fun visualization, roughly speaking 1 part per million in water vapor is what a cloud looks like. If CO2 had the same visual properties as water, it would be pitch black on the ground. People keep looking to the past for answers, and yes it does provide valuable context. But what we are doing now has never happened on this planet, we are blindly rushing into a future that is beyond comprehension. Some things will go worse than expected, some thing will go a lot better, but nobody really knows just yet. Also to the last line "I am glad that I live far away from the effects", alas, this isn't like empires of the past that are geographically limited. Those that can collapse but there is still plenty of untouched lands and civilizations. We now live in a global system, a six continent supply chain. We will all be impacted.
flakeoil 23d ago
I think this talk about 1.5C or 2C degree increase is confusing and make the issue look less alarming. Firstly this is a global average, including both land and ocean temperature. The land temperatures will increase much more than the ocean temperatures and the oceans cover a higher surface. So with a 2C incease on average globally could mean 6-8 degrees more on land on average. And we are also talking about averages and globally at the same time. So at specific instances and specific places it will get even warmer, say 10-20 degrees during days or weeks. So GIEC, researchers, magazines and others should more clearly describe what this means and stop talking about these 1.5C and 2C degree increases and instead talk about how much warmer it will be on land or some other more useful measure.
- olmo23 23d ago
  Eurostar has upgraded the technical specifications for its new fleet of double-decker trains to operate in temperatures of up to 55°C (131°F).
AlecSchueler 23d ago
> I am glad that I live far away from the effects I've heard it said that we'll all be watching a series of disasters play out on our phones until it comes time to see one play out through our windows.
ainiriand 23d ago
Sea water temperature here in Valencia was something crazy this year. I do not remember anything like this before.
prime_ursid 22d ago
If the climate effects don’t get you, the political fallout of a million climate refugees showing up at your borders will.
meta-level 22d ago
reminds me of https://xkcd.com/1379/ https://xkcd.com/1379/
tsoukase 22d ago
I am also in a convenient place expecting more heat (mountainous region with cold nights/winters, enough water). I admit I enjoy the warmer months and wait for people come visit me for Coolidays.

by lbriner 23d ago

toomuchtodo 23d ago

“Climate change will manifest as a series of disasters viewed through phones with footage that gets closer and closer to where you live until you're the one filming it.” You cannot outrun agriculture and crop failures, infrastructure failures, insurance costs accelerating to properly price the risk, wild fires, etc. US cattle herds are at record lows from climate related input costs. Romanian, Hungarian, and Bulgarian nuclear reactors no longer have enough water to operate. The Colorado River Basin will only continue to dry out. And so on. Some will be impacted more than others, but everyone will feel some impact, and it potentially will only worsen over time. If you believe in climate change, do your best to mitigate the impact for the remainder of your lifetime. If you don't believe, oh well, good luck. https://x.com/ZackBornstein/status/1877055187241594986 https://x.com/ZackBornstein/status/1877055187241594986 Londoners Find ‘Horrendous’ Cracks in Their Homes After Successive Heat Waves - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-08-23/londoners-find-horrendous-cracks-in-homes-after-heat-waves https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-08-23/londoners... | https://archive.today/koMaT https://archive.today/koMaT - August 23rd, 2026 > “The impact that climate change is having is undeniable.” -- Laura Hughes, Head of general insurance at the Association of British Insurers. > 20%-25%: The average property devaluation as a result of subsidence, according to the Federation of Master Builders The Age of Unstoppable Wildfires Has Reached Europe - https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2026-europe-summer-wildfires/ https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2026-europe-summer-wildfi... | https://archive.today/OjDZH https://archive.today/OjDZH - July 30th, 2026 Climate Change Is Already Showing Up in the Cost of Living - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-04-24/climate-change-is-already-making-the-affordability-crisis-worse https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-04-24/climate-c... | https://archive.today/EYTqo https://archive.today/EYTqo - April 24th, 2026 Heat Strains US Power Grids That Need Off-Season Repairs - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-05-19/rising-heat-strains-us-power-grid-in-need-of-off-season-repairs https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-05-19/rising-he... | https://archive.today/K9VF0 https://archive.today/K9VF0 - May 19th, 2026 US Spending on Climate Damage Nears $1 Trillion Per Year - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-06-17/us-spending-on-climate-damage-nears-1-trillion-per-year https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-06-17/us-spendi... | https://archive.today/9IJWo https://archive.today/9IJWo - June 17th, 2025 (Texas night time temps are staying high enough [~78F] that the utility equipment does not get time to cool off and cycle, leading to more faults, for example, and the manufacturing supply chain for transformers has a backlog measured in years)

Forgeties79 23d ago
Even the US military treats climate change as not only real but as a destabilizing threat. What other endorsement could one possibly need?
- deleted 23d ago
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- lbriner 23d ago
  "Yeah but they would say that, they are part of the system" Sadly, there is no way to counter a conspiracy theorist because if you question or counter then you are just part of the conspiracy too. Governments know that they need to do stuff but they also know that ignorant voters who read trash tabloid newspapers will vote them out next time because they might have to pay a little more for their electricity or cars.
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- ColdStream 23d ago
  The US Military hit it right on the head. Climate change is a risk multiplier. It takes already potentially big issues and makes them so much worse.
- _djo_ 23d ago
  It used to. The deeply ideological current administration has decreed that it may no longer do so, and must instead pretend that climate change doesn't exist. [0][1] [0] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/oct/14/pentagon-military-climate-crisis-trump https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/oct/14/pentagon... [1] https://www.eenews.net/articles/pentagon-starts-purging-climate-change-crap/ https://www.eenews.net/articles/pentagon-starts-purging-clim...
  - Forgeties79 22d ago
    Say what you want about the military, I think most of the adults in the room, however many are left, are simply treating the threat is real even if they won’t explicitly say it. Doesn’t mean there isn’t a chilling effect, but also, not everybody is the DEI hire Hegseth.

larsfaye 23d ago

>I am glad that I live far away from the effects Are you not on planet earth? Unless you're on Mars, you're not far away from any effects.

ceejayoz 23d ago
There are regions on the planet that will likely fare better than others, though.
- bix6 23d ago
  Not for long.
- mullingitover 23d ago
  And we can tell ourselves that those regions which fare better will be left entirely alone. No one is going to, say, kill all the inhabitants and take the land from them.
  - hackable_sand 23d ago
    You can't own land, so that solves that issue.
- consumer451 23d ago
  Maybe you will require less insulation reconfiguration than some other regions, but it will be hard to escape the effects of billions of people suffering. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polycrisis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polycrisis edit: To be clear, I still think there is time to react, and stop the worst impacts. We just need to get way off the rails of the route that we are currently on. If we put half of the heroic engineering + global capital that we put into fossil fuel extraction into better things, we could get most of the way to the goal. Fossil fuel extraction is like many simultaneous Manhattan Projects. It's nuts what we put into that. Would be super cool if some of the breakout sessions titled "surviving WW III," were replaced by "avoiding WW III."
- Muromec 23d ago

jimt1234 23d ago

This is exactly what I hear from my MAGA relatives: Why should I care if the ocean rises a few inches? I don't own beachfront property in Florida.

kenhwang 23d ago
From what we've seen, so far the (not projected to be underwater) coastal areas might be the areas spared in this scenario too, because being by the water still moderates temperature swings. It's everywhere else that'll be getting record breaking heat/drought and snow, which have been far more damaging. The disaster radius of hurricanes reaches far more inland than just the coast.
ElProlactin 23d ago
Your relatives clearly aren't MAGA if they're not concerned about what rising sea levels will do to Mar-a-Lago.
- Terr_ 23d ago
  Careful, that's a pitfall there if we assume MAGA words reflect an internal belief system. Too often the words are whatever they have to say in order to secure continued membership in the group: The Emperor's New Clothes are a glorious blue today. P.S: Also, we have always been [about to start|recently victorious] in the [illegal war|undeclared "excursion"] against Irania, and the tariff-free chocolate ration has been raised to twenty grammes per week.
- ColdStream 23d ago
  You know we might just be seeing the starting seed of the future legend of the Merica Atlantis. The fabled sunken land of Mar-a-lago where the King in Orange's folly took his treasures to the dark depths. Although after a few hundred years and many verbal re-tellings it might be the forgotten lands of Margaritaville. King Trump was a fan of a Cheeseburger in paradise. ;)
twothreeone 23d ago
I mean they're right, rising oceans will be a drop in the bucket for the majority of us. Unless we act together, human civilization will end through the combination of breakdown of global trade, mass migration due to heat and resource wars, and collapse of our food chain. Ocean levels are just one of the side effects that goes along with rising global temperatures. Beef production in the US is already down from 30 years ago. At some point you won't be able to raise cows anywhere, less alone feed them. Corn and wheat have seen tremendous fluctuations in the past and will likely continue to fall. Imagine corn yields dropping by more than 80% in the US [1]. Of course MAGA people will probably only notice once the shelves aren't being restocked. [1] https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.0906865106 https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.0906865106

triska 23d ago

> "a few degrees, what difference does that make?" Maybe this helps: Think about when we have a fever of "a few degrees", say, instead of 37 degree Celsius, we have 40. It shows that also a few degrees can make a huge difference.

charcircuit 23d ago
The temperature of a fever is not measuring the temperature outside.
- deleted 23d ago
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- groby_b 23d ago
  This may be hard to understand, but that was an illustrative example on why sometimes a few degree difference have bigger absolute impact than you'd expect from the purely numerical value. Nobody (well, almost nobody, I guess) considered it an explanation or model of climate change.
  - deleted 23d ago
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  - charcircuit 22d ago
    It's like saying the sea level's altitude is important because if a drone assumes it is off by a few meters it can crash into the ground. It ignores that the altitude of a drone is based off of the output of a control system. If you just ignore the control system and adjust the altitude of the drone to the point where it crashes it is just ignoring what happens in reality and is not representative of what is trying to be discussed.
Isaackoz 23d ago
Think even bigger. 1 degrees inside your house? Not noticeable at all. But on a planet-wide scale? A 1 degree difference requires a LOT of energy. It's like boiling a cup of water vs an Olympic sized swimming pool. The latter is going to take a lot more energy than the former.

wcfrobert 23d ago

It's like interest rates. I used to think it's weird why people are so obsessed with a couple percentage points. But it's turns out those couple of percent could mean hundreds of thousands of dollars difference for a 30 year mortgage

yodsanklai 23d ago

> A few degrees warmer in the ocean and El Niño becomes an incredible problem for half the world. Ice age was only 6 degrees less than now, half of Europe was under ice

Windchaser 23d ago
And when the Earth was 3C cooler, NYC was nearly under an ice sheet. The current estimate is that we're heading for +3C warmer, which is gonna have some big impacts.
- ColdStream 23d ago
  Not only are we heading there it might be a lot quicker than we anticipate. The warming is accelerating quickly as the CO2 is cumulative and the feed back loops get more intense. The last decade has seen a 0.48c increase in temperature and due to the decade base line shifting every year and it is increasing in pace. https://www.intelligentliving.co/global-warming-acceleration-2026/ https://www.intelligentliving.co/global-warming-acceleration... The more realistic climate scientists think we will blow past 2c by roughly 2035. We are on track to 3c by 2050 and emissions growth has yet to stop despite all the additional renewables being built. This is why many have said next year with the flow on effects of El Nino that we will be getting a preview of 2035.
  - Windchaser 23d ago
    > The more realistic climate scientists think we will blow past 2c by roughly 2035. We are on track to 3c by 2050 I keep hearing this, but not from the climate science community, but from laypeople. I don't understand it. I haven't yet heard reasonable physical mechanisms that would push us past 3C by 2050, when the mean expectation from major models is still ~2.7C by 2100. We haven't even hit 1.5C yet, not as a running decadal-ish average, using "1.5C target" the way that climate scientists traditionally meant it. How are we going to add another 1.5C in the next 25 years? That'd require 0.65C/decade. I don't understand it. The math ain't mathin'. For what it's worth, the link you cite talks about the reasons for the acceleration. But some of those reasons (El Nino, aerosols) lead to one-off pops that don't translate to higher long-term trends. Meaning, it would be reasonable to guess that the recent acceleration will taper off some, and we'll head back towards 0.2 - 0.25 C/decade from the current 0.35C/decade. But even if we keep up the current 0.35C/decade, we aren't getting to +3C until ~2075.

cameldrv 23d ago

Honestly I think American scientists not speaking in Fahrenheit units to an American audience is an incredibly simple and stupid, but very significant cause of the problem. If I tell you the Earth is going to get 2 degrees C warmer, Americans are going to think, "2 degrees, not that much, barely noticeable." If you tell them it's 4 degrees F, they'll think, that's not a ton, but it's definitely noticeable.

N_Lens 23d ago
I like the 30 year mortgage analogy, something people can connect with. 2% increase in mortgage rate likely means low 6 figures difference in total interest paid.

giarc 23d ago

I fell in the same trap "So it'll be 25C in summer instead of 23C!". Sometimes it's small things that make you realize how small changes make big impacts. For example, I was watching a documentary about caribou in Northern Canada. A whole herd starved and died because of a slight warming during winter. Normally they dig through the snow to find food in the winter. But a slight warming meant the snow fell as freezing rain and left a thick layer of ice on top of the snow. The caribou couldn't dig through it and therefore couldn't eat and they died. A tiny change in temperature wiped out a huge colony.

cmrdporcupine 23d ago

> I am glad that I live far away from the effects but it is sad to think of people losing all kinds of things for the lack of respect of Mother Earth! I thought this too, feeling a bit more smug living in southern Ontario, safer than my family in BC and Alberta next to raging forest fires and potential drought. But seems we now get a few weeks of forest fire smoke every year even down here in lush green great lakes land. And the number of tornadoes and ice storms seem to increase every year. Plus watching the Children of Men style xenophobia and callous disregard for climate refugees set in all over the world. Blech. I love my kids but I think my perspective would be much different and positive if I'd just remained childless.

TacticalCoder 23d ago
> Plus watching the Children of Men style xenophobia and callous disregard for climate refugees set in all over the world. There are no climate refugees... Yet.
- infinite8s 22d ago
  The collapse of Syria was partly due to an extended drought causing famine. A lot of the current xenophobia in Europe is due to the small amount of refugees escaping the effects of this famine and subsequent civil war.
ColdStream 23d ago
Cortisol is the hormone that creates tight social bonds. It is what make you love your kids so much. So the secret to a loving and kind society is to just pour this stuff in the drinking water supply, right? No it strengthened social bonds, both toward family and friends and equally against others. It makes people VERY tribal. Cortisol is also released in long term stressful situations. With a rising tide of poverty and climate blow back, I suspect stress will increase and so too will said tribalism. What we see today with the rising popularist and isolationist political parties is but an echo of the future. We see some of these tendencies when a few thousand or tens of thousands of refugees turn up in a country. What happens when this becomes millions? I have said it for years, many will be welcomed with open arms - those arms being machine guns, bombs and drones. This is the dark future I fear and I hope I am wrong. I do not have kids, it wasn't by choice. But what looked like something of a negative might actually turn out to be a near miss in future. Just keep your kids safe and try to have peace and compassion to others that are trying to do the same.

fragmede 23d ago

It's a marketing copy thing. If instead of 1 degree, they said 1.4 million TWh, which is the amount of energy needed to heat the Earth by 1 degree, it would hit better extreme number emotional buttons, but I'm not in charge of things.

stouset 23d ago
Frankly I think expressing it in Celsius has made Americans think it’s less of a problem than it is. It took me awhile to realize that it’s basically 4°F, which is enormous.

ColdStream 23d ago

Someone I know who worked in the climate sciences once put it so clearly to me. An increase of 1 degree is global, and with 70% of the world being ocean that raises much slower, the temperature rise over land is effectively doubled. So 1c degree is 2c. A 2c world is 4c. That when CO2 was 100 point less than the 280ppm baseline we had an ice age with glaciers down to the 40th(ish) parallels in the Northern Hemisphere. We have now pushed it 150 above the baseline in effectively 150 years and fast accelerating. What seems like something trivial, is actually forcing on an unbelievable scale. Also a fun visualization, roughly speaking 1 part per million in water vapor is what a cloud looks like. If CO2 had the same visual properties as water, it would be pitch black on the ground. People keep looking to the past for answers, and yes it does provide valuable context. But what we are doing now has never happened on this planet, we are blindly rushing into a future that is beyond comprehension. Some things will go worse than expected, some thing will go a lot better, but nobody really knows just yet. Also to the last line "I am glad that I live far away from the effects", alas, this isn't like empires of the past that are geographically limited. Those that can collapse but there is still plenty of untouched lands and civilizations. We now live in a global system, a six continent supply chain. We will all be impacted.

flakeoil 23d ago

I think this talk about 1.5C or 2C degree increase is confusing and make the issue look less alarming. Firstly this is a global average, including both land and ocean temperature. The land temperatures will increase much more than the ocean temperatures and the oceans cover a higher surface. So with a 2C incease on average globally could mean 6-8 degrees more on land on average. And we are also talking about averages and globally at the same time. So at specific instances and specific places it will get even warmer, say 10-20 degrees during days or weeks. So GIEC, researchers, magazines and others should more clearly describe what this means and stop talking about these 1.5C and 2C degree increases and instead talk about how much warmer it will be on land or some other more useful measure.

olmo23 23d ago
Eurostar has upgraded the technical specifications for its new fleet of double-decker trains to operate in temperatures of up to 55°C (131°F).

AlecSchueler 23d ago

> I am glad that I live far away from the effects I've heard it said that we'll all be watching a series of disasters play out on our phones until it comes time to see one play out through our windows.

ainiriand 23d ago

Sea water temperature here in Valencia was something crazy this year. I do not remember anything like this before.

prime_ursid 22d ago

If the climate effects don’t get you, the political fallout of a million climate refugees showing up at your borders will.

meta-level 22d ago

reminds me of https://xkcd.com/1379/ https://xkcd.com/1379/

tsoukase 22d ago

I am also in a convenient place expecting more heat (mountainous region with cold nights/winters, enough water). I admit I enjoy the warmer months and wait for people come visit me for Coolidays.