Oops, Scientists May Have Miscalculated Our Global Warming Timeline
https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/environment/a64093044/climate-change-sea-sponge/
Oops, Scientists May Have Miscalculated Our Global Warming Timeline
https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/environment/a64093044/climate-change-sea-sponge/
29 Comments
Submission Statement:
Whatever your stance is on climate change, it’s impossible to have missed the near-ubiquitous call to action to “keep temperatures from exceeding 1.5 degrees Celsius compared to pre-industrial levels.” Over the past few years, the somewhat bureaucratic phrase has become a rallying cry for the climate conscious.
This ambitious target first surfaced following the Paris Climate Agreement, and describes a sort of climate threshold—if we pass a long-term average increase in temperature of 1.5 degrees Celsius, and hold at those levels for several years, we’re going to do some serious damage to ourselves and our environment.
Well, a paper from the University Western Australia Oceans Institute has some bad news: the world might’ve blown past that threshold four years ago. Published in the journal Nature Climate Change, the paper reaches this conclusion via an unlikely route—analyzing six sclerosponges, a kind of sea sponge that clings to underwater caves in the ocean. These sponges are commonly studied by climate scientists and are referred to as “natural archives” because they grow so slowly. Like, a-fraction-of-a-millimeter-a-year slow. This essentially allows them to lock away climate data in their limestone skeletons, not entirely unlike tree rings or ice cores.
By analyzing strontium to calcium ratios in these sponges, the team could effectively calculate water temperatures dating back to 1700. The sponges watery home in the Caribbean is also a plus, as major ocean currents don’t muck up or distort temperature readings. This data could be particularly useful ,as direct human measurement of sea temperature only dates back to roughly 1850, when sailors dipped buckets into the ocean. That’s why the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) uses 1850 and 1900 as its preindustrial baseline, according to the website Grist.
“The big picture is that the global warming clock for emissions reductions to minimize the risk of dangerous climate change has been brought forward by at least a decade,” Malcolm McCulloch, lead author of the study, told the Associated Press. “Basically, time’s running out.”
The study concludes that the world started warming roughly 80 years before the IPCC’s estimates, and that we already surpassed 1.7 degrees Celsius in 2020. That’s a big “woah, if true” moment, but some scientists are skeptical. One such scientist, speaking with LiveScience, said that “ it begs credulity to claim that the instrumental record is wrong based on paleosponges from one region of the world
Honestly does it make much of a difference at this point? It’s already too late in so many ways, does it matter when the horses left the barn? We’re still closing the barn doors after the fact.
It doesn’t matter. We aren’t doing anything substantial to combat it anyways.
Humanity is the scourge of the earth, keep burning all the things and hasten the end. Were all worthless anyways.
It’s been fairly obvious for a while that when the models are wrong, they’re wrong on the low side. Lower temp predictions, slower timeline
Even weather app forecast data is consistently lower in temp predictions. The models haven’t caught up because the models are wrong
It’s going to happen faster than we though, and it’s going to be worse
And we’re still not going to do anything because energy companies need to keep profits high and politicians are too old to care what happens after they die
I hope so, please tell me it’s days and weeks and not years and years
No surprise i hope ?
Now i am team science all the way, but be honest, statistics can be played with and interpreted with great flexibility and mostly science haven’t tried to claim they knew how bad it was in the greatest detail. Scientists have tried to be not too alarmist and politicians have tried to act like there is still hope.
But really, we never stood a chance. Well, we would have if we would have started fixing our shit about a century ago, maybe even half a century ago, but once we got to the 21th century and still weren’t doing anything, we were pretty much doomed. Note that this is not an argument to still not do anything. There are varying degrees of doom.
How many climate change deadlines have already come and gone since people started talking about it? At least 3 i can think of, dating back to the 90s. If they were ever right about this, we’d already be living in an apocalyptic hellscape
I’m sure TRUMP will speed up any Global warming with more and more fossil fuel emissions
Even if this particular paper is wrong, the conclusion almost certainly is not.
I’ve lived through 10 straight years of “Oh we probably underestimated climate change progression so we’re updating our models to be worse than we thought”.
It’s pretty obvious we’re systemically under-estimating our impact on the world and we’re a lot further along than climate scientists wants to admit.
The reason they don’t want to admit it is pretty clear and not really nefarious. They don’t want to be seen as alarmist since we’ve had 70 years of propaganda about how climate scientists are making things up.
“Oops an army of lawyers, slanderous media and corrupt university administrators with a multi billion dollar warchest may have censored the correct calculations about our global warming timeline”
Fixed that for you.
You don’t get to scream “alarmist” or “absurd hockey stick graph” every time someone speaks for 50 years and then complain that they weren’t trying to warn you.
Truly disgusting level of victim blaming.
The article text is okay though, even if mildly sensationalistic on a new avenue that needs more follow up. Which is ironic as it follows the same pattern of an author doing the right thing and the editor fucking it up.
The headline makes it sound as if scientists screwed up. That’s an unfair optic. We keep getting new data, and finding new ways of measuring it, so models will keep getting better. Are they perfect now? No. Will they improve? Yes. Will they ever be perfect? No such thing.
Well , another thing to be worried about, thank you very much !
It’s time to throw in the towel. We’re never going to get everyone to come together on this. We’re never going to do enough to stop it.
It’s a challenge, not wanting to be alarmist. Hindsight 20/20
From speaking with an environmental scientist, the biggest problem is that the data they receive from large businesses, the ones contributing the most to global warming, often is wrong.
Whether intentional or just employees are human beings and don’t track everything perfectly, everyone is trying to say they are more “green” than they are. Scientists do their best trying to track it, but it’s difficult to account for business growth AND the lack of reporting.
It’s kind of like how difficult it is to get accurate statistics on SA and child abuse in churches. You have to account for a larger percentage than what is being reported.
This aligns more closely with our reality.
Theres no way we are getting a slow down in AMOC, violent weather patterns, extreme highs and lows and we are under 1.5.
Now that we have exceeded it, we have to wait like 30-40 years to see the what I’d like to call the Tesla effect – widespread adoption of That fascists EV cars. That has to make a dent in 30-40 years
I feel like that has been fairly obvious living on a coast, Spring is now almost a month early each year. Summer is not at all normal, dry with long stretches of hot sunny days. Used to be very wet and temperate. Triple digit days unheard of, now uncommon, but still…
Isn’t it obvious?
Perhaps we expected corporations and legislatures to give a shit more than they did.
I have maintained COVID lulled people into a false sense of things getting better because there were a few positive markers in climate data. Like, no shit. That is what we were pushing for. Fewer flights and drives to reduce emissions. Then we went back to normal, and the climate got back to its upward trajectory because on a global scale, 18 months is less than a blink. It is the neuron telling your brain to blink. Not even the response back.
The earth is going to be just fine, can’t say the same for humankind.
Almost like the “science” keeps changing to fit a narrative, isn’t it?
I am skeptical, and the responses on this thread highlight how deep science ignorance on Reddit is. All scientific studies are flawed, but some are useful, so just because it’s published in a scientific periodical doesn’t make it true. You have to use your brain.
The IPCC figures are based on many studies collected with many different methodologies, and projections from many computer models. One study saying we are already over 0.5C above our 1.5C or less target puts this study *way* into outlier territory.
I will not say the IPCC results are perfect–if this article reported less than expected change, then chances are the IPCC and this sub would disregard it. That logic cuts both ways; if you don’t disregard high outliers then you are causing systematic bias.
It is much easier to believe that this study is being confounded by an unknown or undisclosed factor than that the IPCC figures are off by over a decade and half a degree. If that’s even in the ballpark of true, then the vast majority of climate science articles have bad data in them.
One of the factors contributing to this is cruise ships, a minor factor but a great thing to look at. It is interesting to learn how difficult it is for these giant ships to slow down and make adjustments to their trajectory. What a perfect analogy for us small peons wanting to make a change to save the planet.
We are passengers on a cruise ship we were put on. As we sit on the top deck we can see the ship is headed straight for land. We yell and scream and wave about the need to change course, while the captain slumbers and parties in the bridge.
The powers of the world need to hit the brakes and attempt to steer clear of the disaster we can see ahead of us. The captain of the ship and the crew missed the time to drop anchor and stop the ship, but we can still avoid a direct hit. Here we are watching it happen knowing it will be bad in a short while… knowing the changes we make right now will avoid a huge catastrophe and yet the people in charge plow ahead.
TL:DR were all mega super screwed with extra whipped cream on top kinda screwed. I’m not gonan fear monger anymore, just gonna try and live out the rest of my life with my family and be there for them as much as I can and not have children. Humanity it was a nice run. We have shown that we collectively cannot live with eachother and someone always has to step on someone else to get ahead. good riddance, maybe theres a chance humans can start again in the far far far future and develop a new system where they can all live evenly and in prosperity.
I feel like some context is missing. The hottest (worst- case) models we have are being excluded because while they seem to work well for the current climate, they consistently fail for historical predictions, when we have decent data.
That is normally a sane decision. Unless there are unkown unknowns.
The worst case conclusion of that is that the clouds of today seem to be very different to the clouds of the past. there seems to be a really critical parameter for supercooled particles in clouds that the climate is ridiculously sensitive to. Sabine talked about this last year and I encourage all to read the studies she cited
More misguided hysterics, more junk science. Nothing to see here.
Hearst Communications owns Popular Mechanics. 70% of their political donations are to Republicans.
“Oops, corporatists may have influenced interpretation of global warming data timeline to delay action to benefit their bottom line”
There, I fixed your headline.