Alastair B. McDonald <abmcdonald33@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Friday, 15 September 2023 at 21:55:27 UTC, Spike wrote:
>> Alastair B. McDonald wrote:
>>> On Thursday, 14 September 2023 at 16:34:37 UTC+1, Spike wrote:
>>>> Paul from Llanmaes <pauljg...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>> And the warmest August by over 0.2C; a huge amount. The period
>>>>> June/July/August has also been the warmest on record by a wide margin.
>>>>>
>>>>> No El Niño yet and El Niño conditions are forecast to continue well into next year.
>>>>>
>>>>> Worrying times for global climate and for us humans.
>>>>>
>>>>> https://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/tabledata_v4/GLB.Ts+dSST.txt
>>>> The globe has been here before, and it has survived.
>>>>
>>>> So have humans.
>>>>
>>>> No climate believer has ever explained why the particular climate we have
>>>> enjoyed is so special that it should be preserved in aspic, especially
>>>> because of the known regular and wild swings in planetary temperatures
>>>> driven by forces we don’t understand and can’t control. Any chance, with
>>>> your searing insight, you could come up with something in the way of an
>>>> explanation?
>>>>
>>>> --
>>>> Spike
>>>
>>> Spike,
>>>
>>> Here’s another answer to your question
>>> https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#inbox/FMfcgzGtwztzNtNRtNDdMrgWDjKvhCXr
>> I don’t have a Google account…
>>
>> --
>> Spike
> Well here is the text copied and pasted:
>
> Why is 1.5 so important?
>
> Almost every country agreed to try and limit global heating to 1.5°C at
> the 2015 Paris climate conference. The decision was hailed by small
> islanders and scientists who warned that devastation lay beyond this threshold.
> Nearly eight years later, meteorologists have confirmed that July 2023
> was the hottest ever recorded – a month in which the air temperature at
> our planet's surface was 1.5°C hotter than the pre-industrial average.
> Have efforts to avert dangerous warming now officially failed? And what
> is so important about the 1.5°C target anyway?
> You're reading the Imagine newsletter – a weekly synthesis of academic
> insight on solutions to climate change, brought to you by The
> Conversation. I'm Jack Marley, energy and environment editor. This week,
> we're discussing life at 1.5°C.
> "The threshold was breached for a month before average temperatures
> dropped back. And July 2023 isn’t actually the first time this has
> happened either – the dubious honour goes to February 2016, where we
> broke the threshold for a few days," say Ailie Gallant and Kimberley
> Reid, climate and atmosphere scientists at Monash University.
> Then, as now, Earth was in what is called an El Niño event. This is the
> hot phase of a natural fluctuation in the climate which tends to last a
> few years and temporarily amplifies the background rate of warming caused
> predominantly by burning fossil fuels (animal farming and deforestation
> are also big sources of planet-warming greenhouse gases like CO₂ and methane).
> These two factors combined meant Earth exceeded the 1.5°C threshold for a
> whole month for the first time this summer.
> "But the climate is more than a single month," Gallant and Reid stress.
> The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the global authority on
> climate change, defines the threshold as the first 20-year period in
> which air surface temperatures average 1.5°C above what they were between
> 1850 and 1900 (referred to as the pre-industrial average). A study
> published earlier this year estimates that we could pass this point in the early 2030s.
> So what awaits us in this world made a degree-and-a-half hotter? Gallant
> and Reid describe "dangerous" levels of warming as that which threatens
> the stability of ecosystems, economies and agriculture and makes adapting
> very difficult or impossible.
> "Put simply, the 1.5°C threshold is the best estimate of the point where
> we are likely to find ourselves well up the proverbial creek, without a paddle," they say.
> And then there is the risk of triggering irreversible climate tipping
> points. These are self-sustaining shifts in the climate system that lock
> in devastating changes after a certain level of warming has occurred,
> such as the collapse of ice sheets or the rapid die-back of the Amazon
> rainforest. Both changes could accelerate the rate at which Earth is
> heating by reflecting less sunlight to space or releasing more carbon to the atmosphere.
> But a scientist studying these possible tipping points explains that
> passing 1.5°C is not necessarily "game over" for the climate.
> "Most scientists don’t expect the world to reach a slew of climate
> tipping points if El Niño causes the world to cross 1.5°C briefly,"
> Stockholm University's David Armstrong McKay wrote in April.
> "Our estimates for climate tipping point thresholds are based on what
> would happen if global warming stayed at that level for many years. So a
> tipping threshold that is estimated to lie at 1.5°C won’t have been
> reached until global temperatures average 1.5°C for around a decade."
> If that sounds reassuring, McKay has a caveat:
> "Recent research I led judged that several of these climate tipping
> points become likely beyond 1.5°C and can’t be ruled out even at current
> warming of around 1.2°C."
> If dangerous shifts in Earth's climate are possible south of 1.5°C, why
> is so much hope and anxiety invested in it?
> "There’s nothing magic about this number," Gallant and Reid say. "Every
> increase worsens the impacts."
> '2°C is a death sentence'
> For much of the time countries have been debating Earth's rising
> temperature, 1.5°C was not the official goal at all.
> "Halting global heating at 2°C remained the horizon to which negotiators
> strived for nearly two decades," says Piers Forster, director of the
> Priestley International Centre for Climate at the University of Leeds.
> "And yet, you’re more likely to hear about the rapidly approaching 1.5°C
> temperature limit nowadays."
> That world leaders eventually agreed to revise down the acceptable level
> of climate damage is testament to the campaigning of a formation of
> island nations known as the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS), Forster says.
> At Copenhagen's 2009 climate summit, the world still lacked a scientific
> assessment of what a "safe" limit to warming looked like. But research
> had started to paint a picture of an Earth 2°C warmer: widespread coral
> bleaching, receding coastlines and increasingly erratic weather. Worse,
> it seemed sea-level rise would proceed more rapidly and violently than in
> earlier predictions. At stake was the survival of some small islands.
> "Only stopping global temperature rise well below 1.5°C would head off
> this catastrophe, AOSIS argued," Forster says. "As Mia Mottley, prime
> minister of Barbados, would later put it: '2°C is a death sentence.'"
> "The idea that a 'safe' level of warming could be achieved was
> subjective: current levels were already unsafe for those on the sharpest
> end of climate change," Forster adds.
> The story of the 1.5°C limit highlights that the only acceptable level of
> warming is that which humanity collectively decides, Forster says. So can
> the Paris signatories still keep their promise? Maybe, say Gallant and Reid.
> "We would need extremely aggressive cuts to emissions to have a chance.
> Failing that, we will likely exceed the Paris target within the next decade or so."
> "The closer we stay to the line – even if we cross it – the better. And
> there’s now good evidence that even if we overshoot 1.5°C, we could still
> reverse it by ending emissions and soaking up excess greenhouse gas emissions.
> "It’s like turning around an enormous container ship – it takes time to
> overcome the inertia. But the sooner we turn around, the better."
> Correction: last week's newsletter on invasive species referred to
> "rivers choked with [Japanese] knotweed". This behaviour is more
> accurately ascribed to Himalayan balsam.
> - Jack Marley, Environment commissioning editor
>
>
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I’m very sorry to have to say this, but the above article is warmist
claptrap, merely perpetuating the sort of doom-laden speculation that in
previous decades gave us ‘Polar bears are dying out’ (they weren’t and they
haven’t) and, since it mentions the year, that ‘The Maldives will be under
water by 2015’ (which they weren’t and they aren’t).

There’s nothing scientific in any of it, it’s just propaganda for the
faithful.

--
Spike