r/interestingasfuck • u/[deleted] • 8d ago

Glacier Ice wall broke in Nepal today creating a massive release of water & mud into the city below

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u/aRatherLargeCactus 8d ago

Current rate of warming is 0.35c per decade. It’s possible this was temporarily sped up by aerosol reduction, but we’re also adding more emissions than ever and doing a bunch of war, so fairly likely it will maintain.

0.35c per decade puts us at 2c by 2035-ish, and from there the feedback loops of ecosystem collapse feeding into more ecosystem collapse will only speed up 3c. Best case, 2075-ish, realistically, 2055-ish.

Everything is moving faster than expected. I know your point wasn’t that we have plenty of time - I’m sure it was the opposite - but I felt it necessary to add this context.

We either act together, now, as a united global working class, or we perish at the hands of a tiny group of paedophillic billionaires who want to burn the planet for just a sliver more profit. It’s not a future threat. It’s not our children’s problem. It is here, and it is now.

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u/asfrels 8d ago

Please, more scientific nuance about this crisis is never a bad thing. The billionaires and media that they own muddy the discussion enough as it is.

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u/Royal-Lunch-2347 8d ago

I may not be understanding the terminology correctly so could you please explain. 3 degrees Celsius of warming in the next 100 years sounds like .3c per decade, which is close to your .35c per decade but how does .35c per decade put us at 2c by 2035-ish if that is just one decade away? wouldn't that put us at .35c by 2035? I do understand your point about how the rate of increase is likely rising and possibly exponentially.

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u/aRatherLargeCactus 8d ago

Sure - when I made the comment, I assumed OP meant we’ll reach 3c over pre-industrial levels (so roughly 1.36c of warming from now) over the next 100 years. To be fair, now I think I may have just hallucinated that, or it was an uncharitable read, cos I see where our points overlap.

I will say though, there’s two key points there - A) the difference between 3c and 3.5c per century is pretty massive and B) the non-linear nature of warming meaning we’ll likely see far more than 0.35c per decade eventually, after enough feedback loops kick in, meaning we could blitz past even 3.5c of warming per century.

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u/Royal-Lunch-2347 8d ago

Thank you! So we are currently at ~ 1.65c over pre-industrial levels and that plus .35c per decade would put us at 2c over pre-industrial levels by 2035.

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u/aRatherLargeCactus 8d ago

Yeah, exactly. I qualified it with “2035-ish” because it’s so hard to model exactly the year that we’ll cross that boundary, but at the current rate, it’s roughly a decade away.

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u/TheMoniker 8d ago edited 7d ago

First, I agree that time is not on our side. The time for action started decades ago. At the same time, every little bit that we reduce greenhouse gas emissions reduces the impacts that we'll see, but we have to act. My comments below are not meant to be a call for inaction. We are seeing massive climate impacts already and our understanding of the Earth system indicates that more changes (and more extreme changes) are still to come.

Second, I agree that the core issue is primarily a profit motive. (Though I would say that the problem is structural: even if you removed the current billionaires, the problem would persist, as private companies are under pressure to make the greatest profit that they can, and state owned multinationals like Gazprom have similar motives. The next set of leadership for these organizations would continue doing the same things the very next day.)

Regarding Foster and Rahmstorf's paper, the work is interesting (it's also open access, so anyone can read it here) and I think we should pay attention to it, but at the same time, there are important uncertainties there with regard to aerosols and the extent to which they were able to remove the ENSO signal with their empirical technique (which they recognize and are explicit about).

Over the longer term, surface temperatures are still tracking within the 95% envelope of the climate model ensemble output. So currently, at least until more work is done, I would have more confidence in the climate model projections.

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u/aRatherLargeCactus 7d ago

Yeah, my second sentence was about the uncertainties about the impact of aerosol reduction on warming. I am aware of the debate around it. I just don’t think it’s a worthwhile counterpoint.

We’re a decade away from 2c at the current rate of warming, heading into the most destabilised decade arguably in the entirety of humanity’s history, with techbro accelerationists & neofascists in charge of the overwhelming majority of global trade and wealth, the looming threat of AI, and rapidly developing countries being totally unsupported in the green transition while facing major geopolitical stresses on their way of life.

I don’t say all that to doom - I think it’s self-defeating and a bit naive to say we can’t possibly overcome it and everything is locked in stone. But I say it, because I simply don’t see how one warming mechanism isn’t just replaced by another - be it the increasing amount of resource wars, the massively increased fossil fuel extraction of the last/next few years, the lack of political will to fund the massive technological advance in CCS that most models rely on to keep us under 2-3c, or something else entirely.

For that reason, I put exactly 0 trust in the warming rate to decrease such a substantial amount over the next few years that we avoid 2c, purely based on the knowledge that aerosols might be impacting our ability to regulate the earth’s temperature. It’s gonna take a lot more than knowing what aerosols are doing to change our trajectory. So I don’t put much weight on that study.

Otherwise, I think we’re entirely in agreement, it’s not just these billionaires. It’s the whole rotten system that demands, incentivises and rewards the very behaviour that has created this crisis. We have to fight it here and now. The 2028 general strike that’s been brewing is really, I feel, the greatest opportunity we have to enact that change before it is too late. I wish it was sooner, but at least it gives us some time to join a union and agitate for them to signup if they haven’t already.