“The uncomfortable reality of life on Earth after we breach 0.1°C”
By Paul Homewood
THIS time next year, you may be living in the same house, driving the same car and doing the same job. But in one fundamental way, life on Earth could have shifted irrevocably. Spiking worldwide temperatures, boosted by a transition to an El Niño climate pattern, could make 2024 the year that global warming exceeds 1.5°C for the first time. It may not sound like much, but scientists warn it will be a totemic moment for the planet.
Undoubtedly, breaching 1.5°C is a sign of political failure. Just eight years ago, almost every nation agreed to a binding treaty promising to hold the global temperature rise to a maximum of 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels. Blowing past that threshold so soon will bring huge political fallout and unleash reactionary forces that could turbocharge – or cripple – the climate movement. “All hell will break loose,” says Jochem Marotzke at the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Germany. “That is something I’m very sure of.”
But beyond this discontent, there are many other impacts of crossing this threshold. It will have catastrophic consequences for people living in the hardest-hit parts of the world and bring even wilder, more unpredictable and extreme weather for all of us.
You have to pay to read the rest of it, and I am certainly not going to waste money on the unscientific tripe they publish.
The 1.5C threshold never was a scientific calculation in the first place; the 2.0C target it replaced was far too distant to carry any political clout. And, of course, the 1.5C is the comparison with the pre-industrial temperatures of the Little Ice Age, which should mean little to ordinary people. The fact that we have already supposedly got to about 1.2C above that baseline without the world becoming “hellish”, as they claim, should hardly be a cause for panic over another few hundredths of a degree warming, which in any event would be impossible to measure outside of the world of climate scientists with a political agenda.
Global temperatures peaked during the long El Nino in 2015/16, but were not significantly higher than in 1998, according to the satellite data:
https://www.nsstc.uah.edu/climate/
If they want global temperature targets, they should be set against the current ones that people have grown up with and are used to.
But a headline that reads “The uncomfortable reality of life on Earth after we breach 0.1°C” does not have quite the same ring to it!
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NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
x
Politicians long ago lost all credibility with thinking people. Now thet wish to tie their abysmal levels of honesty to science and medicine so that they may destroy any trust that the public may have in an independent authority. Why do tbe very worst people gravitate to government positions? Can we filter out the Barney Fife genes from pur public servants and end the foolishness of incompetent people trying to enforce foolishness on the rest of us?
When they invent fake readings and adjust previous temp records it is possible to claim whatever lies they want .
But real readings show the world has been below a 30 year average for the last 8 years or more http://temperature.global/
And lots of other unadjusted readings show that the Global Warming story is just a massive scam.
The “tipping point” temperature has been adjusted down from 4 deg K to 1.5 over the last 20 years as the so-called Equilibrium Climate Sensitivity has reduced. There is no basis for any of these values, other than a group of activist scientists consensus: of course the media will not mention this as they prefer doomsday forecasts.
The original claim was that in all of human history, we hadn’t lived in a time that was 2 degrees (C) above the then temperature (I think it was in the 1980’s). It was never that there was any danger in a higher temperature. That was added later (retrospective amendment to data is always the habit of the warmistas).
I forgot to add, moving the baseline back to the coldest part of the Little Ice Age was another retrospective amendment.
Human beings have lived – indeed thrived – in ages 2 degrees warmer than 40 years ago : the Eemian Warm Period 122 000 years ago and the Holocene Climatic Optimum 7000 – 5000 BCE . As I understand it , there were no demographic death spirals of human communities in those salubrious climes …The Minoan and Roman Optimums , when human civilizations flourished , were also considerably warmer than the late 20thC – early 21st C warming …There were no precipitous “tipping points’ that plunged societies into cataclysmic hothouse hells then either ..Rather ,they crumbled and collapsed as temperatures cooled .
I see that Al Gore is reported as claiming that we have already passed 5 “tipping points”, but that climate collapse will soon take place if we don’t mend our ways
He seems oblivious to the absurdity of claiming tipping points have already happened with no noticeable effect.
“Spiking worldwide temperatures, boosted by a transition to an El Niño climate pattern…”
But the ENSO is entirely natural, been affecting weather for thousands of years. And has been in the cold phase La-Nina since 2019 and there hasn’t been a warm phase El-Nino in seven years. Meanwhile CO2 makes new records each year. And we are suppose to give up all of the energy that got us here to stop all this global warming. Can’t be done anyhow.
The data shows pretty clearly that the main driver of average global temperatures is the ENSO. Big El Ninos release a lot of energy to the atmosphere and that appears to take some time to be released to space – perhaps slowed somewhat by more CO2. Unless this El Nino is extremely big, I forecast a short-lived spike in temperature, followed by the continued slow decline we have seen after El Ninos in the past.
A few forecasts made in March/April predicted a very big El Nino. This got the alarmists all excited as an El Nino as strong as 1998 or 2015/16 would undoubtably push global temperature anomalies above 1.5 degrees, at least for a few months. El Nino forecasts made before May are notoriously unreliable, and the latest predictions are for a moderate El Nino. Even these should be taken with a pinch of salt as it’s still about 6 months until an El Nino will peak. There’s a huge pool of cooler than average water of the coast of California/Mexico that is flowing towards the El Nino area, which could well further dampen down an incipient El Nino, so it wouldn’t surprise me in the slightest if each new prediction is for a weaker El Nino than the previous prediction. I predict global temperature anomalies this year and next year will be a few tenths of a degree above the past few years, but fall well short of the highs from 2015/16.
A strong El Nino (50% chance according to some soothsayers) would push most metrics up by 0.3 C in March and April 2024. Cue headlines. Followed by a turn down of the metrics. Cue no
headlines. Job done.
Personally, I have long forecast that natural cycles are bringing cooling, but that this will not be sufficiently obvious to shake the true believers before about 2030.
Tant pis.
“…an El Nino climate pattern…”
No such thing. An “El Nino REGIME..”
But what is the point of correcting these people? They have the floor and will continue to have the floor.
And for all the ‘settled science’ there is no explanation of why ENSO exists nor any ability to predict it.
There doesn’t have to be an explanation. Periodic or quasi periodic outputs can be generated by random forcings acting on a system replete with interactions and feedbacks of different magnitudes and time constants. The climate system viewed as a set of boxes representing atmosphere, ocean and biosphere, connected by energy, water and chemical fluxes is surely such a system producing what we call natural variability.
The general explanation for the ENSO is the effects of the trade winds and the jet streams, both parts of natural variability. Unaffected by AGW CO2.
Jet stream?
God, I hope King Charles doesn’t read this apocalyptic nonsense: he’ll became even more insufferable than the Swedish Harpie (according to MY team of ‘experts’)!
My guess is that 10+million Brits of all ages go on holiday every year to Mediterranean countries where the temperatures are routinely 5+ Deg C warmer than in the UK, so how come we are suddenly going to keel over dying from less than a tenth of these higher temperatures here in the UK?
Maybe the Met Office would care to explain??
It’s a mystery why we don’t have millions rushing to the Scottish Highlands to escape the heat misery. Must be the lack of hotels 😀
+1, ob, OB
Beware of a totemic moment! Madeleine Cuff is a totemic environmentalist.
George, Madeleine Cuff has precisely zero scientific qualifications. I find people like her insulting and should be treated with the utmost contempt.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/madeleine-cuff-46b0b841/?originalSubdomain=uk
I balked at that, too. ‘Totemic’ means “resembling a totem.” “Totem” is an object. Madeleine tortures metaphors.
There appears to be an alternate copy of the New Scientist article at https://www.scihb.com/2023/06/the-uncomfortable-reality-of-life-on.html for those who are interested.
“…those who are interested.”
Not me. I stopped reading New Scientist, Scientific American, National Geographic, etc. decades ago. Until then, they were worth a look. They were even moderately authoritative.
It became obvious that all scientific publishing – whether popular or academic – was falling into the hands of a few, large, multi-nationals, who seemed to come from nowhere, with impersonal and opaque natures. They were just ‘brands.’
I never found evidence that these multi-nationals are anything more than profit-oriented businesses. But, they do not seem to care what is actually in the publications.
They have ‘outsourced’ basic decision-making on content to intensely activist people from main-stream Academia. The ruin of genuine science is well under way.
‘They have ‘outsourced’ basic decision-making on content to intensely activist people from main-stream Academia.’
And Twitter.
They claim it’s the internet’s fault (but it’s not). The big money in periodicals was never in circulation; it was in advertising.
“You are not the customer; you are the product.”
The internet killed their advertising pot of gold. And many reduced staff and looked elsewhere for content. But the money
crunch does not explain their toxic cultural Marxist editorial policy. They are running their ship aground, enjoying the scenery as they go. Everyone else can see it.
“But a headline that reads “The uncomfortable reality of life on Earth after we breach 0.1°C” does not have quite the same ring to it!”
With the Earth’s magnetic field reducing in strength, the protection from the Sun is reducing, so we are more likely to suffer a larger effect if, or when, we have another Carrington Event:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrington_Event
It looks like we are being distracted. Here’s an update:
I have instructed my family, when my time is up, to bury me standing up so my head can be above water!
In the last interglacial (about 125,000 years ago) the climate was 2.5℃ warmer, the oceans were about 6 metres higher and there were elephants, giraffes and hippos in the Thames Valley (and likely the Rhine) yet modern humans must have survived.
40,000 years when Neanderthals roamed where I am now in SW France is is acknowledged that temperatures were 1-2 degrees warmer than now. They thrived and modern humans dos so to when they arrived. These tipping points are obvious fiction.
‘Undoubtedly, breaching 1.5°C is a sign of political failure.’
Politicians failed to control the weather. A capital offense?
‘almost every nation agreed to a binding treaty’
The joke at the time was that it was NOT binding. Maddy pretends.
‘promising to hold the global temperature rise to a maximum of 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels’
Maddy pretends we know pre-industrial temperatures.
Cirrusly. We have no (*&^ing clue what global mean temperatures were 150 years ago. We can only estimate today’s temperatures.
Tony Heller shows us the state-of-the-art in 1900:
GC…one of the clearest observations I’ve read. How can a supposedly literate person (Cuff) believe such a thing?
People believe what they want to believe and what they have been told to believe.
‘I have squandered my
resistance for a pocketful
of mumbles
Such are promises
All lies and jest
Still a man hears what he
wants to hear
And disregards the rest’
Paul Simon, “The Boxer,” 1970
Literate maybe but numerate Cuff sure ain’t. I penned this in her direction shortly after she joined “i” newspaper in 2020:
In your report “ War on plastic waste turns on ketchup sachets” (Wednesday 26 February, p13) the i’s new environmental reporter repeats campaigners’ statements that the 855 billion sachets used globally each year are sufficient to cover the entire surface of the Earth. This is readily “fact-check-able” starting from the Earth’s surface area being 5.1 x 1014 square metres (say, 5 with 14 zeros after it). Dividing this by 855 billion gives close to 600 square metre for each sachet, about the area of three tennis courts. A more accurate way of expressing sachet consumption (assuming a typical sachet of 50 x 100 mm) would have been to say it would take 120,000 years at the current rate of usage to cover the entire surface of the Earth!
Apparently, there is an El Niño event coming. Such events release the warm water in stacked up in the Western Pacific. This warmth passes into the atmosphere and many weather events will be noted.
How did that heat get into the, so called, Pacific Warm Pool? Blame it on the Sun and the clean water of the tropical Pacific Ocean. Life on Earth will notice the, sometimes, surprising weather events. Such El Niños are not new.
See the journal article: The Callao Painter
This is a preview, but note the date -1943
https://www.jstor.org/stable/18120 :
If its an El Nino that makes it warm, how is it “irrevocable”?
I find it quite interesting that it’s “carbon” that’s the problem, but much of the MSM including the BBC say it’s the warm cycle of ENSO that is the trigger for this step into the unknown.
Not only that but the temperature may drop back in the next cool phase.
That tacitly admits that it’s more than “carbon” that affect climate and global temperature. When will something else be added to the duo?
X
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So the loonies have enlisted El Nino to their cause…..wonders will never cease.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-05453-y
“Late Pliocene and Early Pleistocene epochs 3.6 to 0.8 million years ago1 had climates resembling those forecasted under future warming”
Was it a ‘tipping point’ or ‘climate emergency’ 1,000 years ago when the Vikings grew barley in Greenland, clearly warmer than now?
Actually they did encounter a climate emergency when the Little Ice Age descended and they were forced to abandon their farms, city and cathedral. We should fear cooling more than warming.
“…The Little Ice Age…”
This may not have finished:
https://www.climateclock.no/2023/04/nao-update-2023/
‘hold the global temperature rise to a maximum of 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels’
They use a decimal point to show they have a sense of humour.
Can someone remind me of the scientific basis for the 1.5? And the 2.0? I forget