The New Normal - Beyond Doom

[Bird on a Fire]

There is a "narrow and closing window of opportunity to make transformational changes to move towards and not away from development futures that are more climate-resilient and sustainable", and unfortunately things are currently going from bad to worse:

The report warns that current development trends along with the impacts of climate change “are leading away from, rather than toward, sustainable development”. There is moderate agreement and robust evidence for this conclusion, the report notes.

These trends include “rising income inequality, continued growth in greenhouse gas emissions, land use change, food and water insecurity, human displacement, and reversals of long-term increasing life expectancy trends in some nations”, the report says. In turn, these trends “contribute to worsening poverty, injustice and inequity, and environmental degradation”, the authors say, which can be further exacerbated through climate change “by undermining human and ecological well-being”.

The SPM warns with high confidence that climate resilient development “is already challenging at current global warming levels”, adding:

“The prospects for climate resilient development will be further limited if global warming levels exceeds 1.5C (high confidence) and not be possible in some regions and sub-regions if the global warming level exceeds 2C (medium confidence).”

[IvanV]

So we started with a National Geographic article, which was a popular summary of some IPCC stuff. Now I started by badly misunderstanding it to mean something that was quite outrageously implausible. But I now realise it didn't mean that, it meant something entirely plausible.

But what it was definitely about is what has already happened. It was about the past. My wrongly-directed criticisms were related to statistics.

Now you have just quoted me a whole bunch of stuff about the future. Which is all very interesting, doubtless. But forecasts is not statistics. And my immediate interest is statistics. I made a claim that it is generally hard to exhibit clear trends in extreme weather from statistics. I believe even the IPCC said so in earlier reports. In the technical bits. I would be interested in seeing whether that is still true from the latest statistics and analyses.

So is there anything interesting in the IPCC report you could point me to which assesses weather statistics, rather than forecasts?

[Bird on a Fire]

So we started with a National Geographic article, which was a popular summary of some IPCC stuff. Now I started by badly misunderstanding it to mean something that was quite outrageously implausible. But I now realise it didn't mean that, it meant something entirely plausible.

But what it was definitely about is what has already happened. It was about the past. My wrongly-directed criticisms were related to statistics.

Now you have just quoted me a whole bunch of stuff about the future. Which is all very interesting, doubtless. But forecasts is not statistics. And my immediate interest is statistics. I made a claim that it is generally hard to exhibit clear trends in extreme weather from statistics. I believe even the IPCC said so in earlier reports. In the technical bits. I would be interested in seeing whether that is still true from the latest statistics and analyses.

So is there anything interesting in the IPCC report you could point me to which assesses weather statistics, rather than forecasts?

Sure. This thread is about the future, though, which is why I was posting forecasts - we were discussing them earlier, and I felt that the IPCC report seems to be largely backing up what I wrote, in the face of scepticism from many forumites.

As I mentioned, this latest IPCC report is more about impacts than physical science, but the summary for policymakers gives the following:

SPM.B.1
…The rise in weather and climate extremes has led to some irreversible impacts as natural and human systems are pushed beyond
their ability to adapt. (high confidence)[/b] (Figure SPM.2) {1.3, 2.3, 2.4, 2.6, 3.3, 3.4, 3.5, 4.2, 4.3, 5.2, 5.12, 6.2,
7.2, 8.2, 9.6, 9.8, 9.10, 9.11, 10.4, 11.3, 12.3, 12.4, 13.10, 14.4, 14.5, 15.3, 16.2, CCP1.2, CCP3.2, CCP4.1,
CCP5.2, CCP6.2, CCP7.2, CCP7.3, CCB EXTREMES, CCB ILLNESS, CCB SLR, CCB NATURAL, CCB
DISASTER, CCB MIGRATE, Figure TS.5, TS B

SPM.B.1.1 Widespread, pervasive impacts to ecosystems, people, settlements, and infrastructure have resulted
from observed increases in the frequency and intensity of climate and weather extremes, including hot
extremes on land and in the ocean, heavy precipitation events, drought and fire weather (high
confidence). Increasingly since AR5, these observed impacts have been attributed 28 to human-induced climate
change particularly through increased frequency and severity of extreme events. These include increased heat-
related human mortality (medium confidence), warm-water coral bleaching and mortality (high confidence),
and increased drought related tree mortality (high confidence). Observed increases in areas burned by wildfires
have been attributed to human-induced climate change in some regions (medium to high confidence). Adverse
impacts from tropical cyclones, with related losses and damages19 , have increased due to sea level rise and the
increase in heavy precipitation (medium confidence). Impacts in natural and human systems from slow-onset
processes 29 such as ocean acidification, sea level rise or regional decreases in precipitation have also been
attributed to human induced climate change (high confidence). {1.3, 2.3, 2.4, 2.5, 3.2, 3.4, 3.5, 3.6, 4.2, 5.2,
5.4, 5.6, 5.12, 7.2, 9.6, 9.8, 9.7, 9.8, 9.11, 11.3, Box 11.1, Box 11.2, Table 11.9, 12.3, 12.4, 13.3, 13.5, 13.10,
14.2,14.5, 15.7, 15.8, 16.2, Box CCP5.1, CCP1.2, CCP2.2, CCP7.3, CCB EXTREME, CCB ILLNESS, CCB
DISASTER, WG1 9, WGI 11.3-11.8, WGI SPM.3, SROCC Ch. 4}

All the bits in curly brackets are references to the technical summary, which I haven't looked at yet. Suffice to say, for the purposes of this thread (which takes the science as a given) there's now an extremely clear scientific consensus that climate change has increased the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events, and will continue to do so with growing speed. (Bear in mind that every sentence of the SPM is unanimously approved by all 195 delegations - this really isn't controversial stuff any more).

I did start a thread about climate attribution science which has plenty of links to papers etc.

[Bird on a Fire]

Simultaneously, temperatures in the Antarctic 40°C above normal and in the Arctic +30°C:

Unusually high temperatures in both Antarctica and the Arctic in recent days have shocked researchers, who warn that extremes will become more common as a result of the climate crisis.

Concordia station, high on the Antarctic Plateau, hit a record temperature of -11.8C on Friday, more than 40C warmer than seasonal norms. Vostok station registered a temperature of -17.7C, beating its record by 15C.

At the same time, some stations near the north pole reached 30C above normal, with records broken in Norway and unusually warm temperatures recorded in Greenland and the Russian archipelago of Franz Josef Land.

The Antarctic continent as a whole on Friday was about 4.8C warmer compared to a baseline temperature between 1979 and 2000, the Associated Press reported. On the same day, the Arctic as a whole was 3.3C warmer than the 1979 to 2000 average.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment ... ar-regions

I know quite a few climate-change researchers personally. This is much, much worse than people were expecting, and they are freaking out.