World almost certain to endure record hot year by 2030, UN warns
(www.theguardian.com)
from MicroWave@lemmy.world to world@lemmy.world on 28 May 10:01
https://lemmy.world/post/47446898
from MicroWave@lemmy.world to world@lemmy.world on 28 May 10:01
https://lemmy.world/post/47446898
Global temperature record could be broken as soon as 2027, with El Niño expected later this year
A record-breaking hot year is almost certain by 2030 as the climate crisis intensifies, the UN’s World Meteorological Organization has warned.
With an El Niño event expected later this year, the global temperature record could fall as soon as 2027.
Carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels are continuing to rise, trapping more heat and driving more extreme weather, including the record-breaking heatwave that has hit the UK and Europe this week.
Global heating is already estimated to be taking one life every minute, with the toll likely to rise unless emissions fall rapidly.
#world
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Will there be a solution ???
Well, we’re about 60 to 80,000 years from the next ice age. If we haven’t all died by then we could wait for that?
Or just about every developed nation on the planet needs to move to sustainable fuels now!
Nuclear fusion would be an absolute game changer. Clean, infinite energy, but it is too far away for it to make a difference let alone be able to reverse the damage that is being done. For future generations sake, as a leader of a nation, I’d be throwing all my money at it. Like, yesterday.
It’s not a technology problem. It can be solved with wind farms, solar arrays, batteries and trees. All of which exist today, and are already cheaper than building new fossil fuel, nuclear or fusion power.
The problem is that those solutions decentralize and democratize power generation, which cuts into big corpo profits.
Anyone still advocating for nuclear or fusion power now that better, cheaper alternatives exist, just wants a solution that keeps power generation in the hands of a few.
I disagree. Fusion / fission is a long term goal. Solar is cheap to produce but requires big areas and currently not very efficient. Wind power i think is probably our best immediate term bet. The UK nearly went through the whole of April this year entirely on sustainable fuels alone. Within fusion there are enough countries doing their own thing with varying levels of success that there is enough competition for it to be spread world wide. It is also easily monetized, however i envision it would be expensive for the consumer first as companies claw money back from R&D.
Fusion and even new nuclear power plants will be too late to fix this.
We need non-fossil power at a global scale within 10-20 years.
In that context, framing fusion and nuclear as solutions for the climate crisis is just plain wrong.
We need to put all available funding into solar and wind NOW cause they can be built much faster.
When the immediate crisis is over (hopefully), sure go ahead and develop fusion, although I’m not sure at that point it will still be necessary.
Just a friendly correction: we currently are in an ice age. You’re thinking of the next glaciation. The confusion is understandable because you are using that term exactly how it’s generally used by lay people, but I think the distinction is important, especially as we’re thinking of long term natural history and understanding climate science.
At least theoretically yes. We can release particles into the atmosphere that has the opposite effect of the greenhouse gasses. That instead of keeping the heat within the atmosphere, would reflect heat back to the universe.
But since USA seems keen to continue to completely drop the ball on the issue, for such solutions we probably need to look to EU or China.
My suggestion would be to put particles in geostationary orbit above USA, because they are the main villain that has caused this problem, and has done the least to help solve it. So it might as well be them that get less sunlight.
billionaire bunkers and secret underground cities
No shit. I remember the messages from climate scientists in the 1980s about global warming (as it used to be called), and its almost as if the whole conversation didn’t rear its head properly till mid 2010s. It isn’t something I’m an expert on, but I feel like we are beyond the point of no return. In the UK we have just this week set the record high temp, a month sooner than the usual weather starts. It isn’t that its getting hotter, it is that it is now on average far hotter earlier and longer. The absolute insane greed of the stock markets around the world putting their il gotten gains into AI data centres is just going to exacerbate the problem. As it gets hotter, people buy more air conditioning which then makes it worse! Its a vicious circle.
There is part of me that hopes that the current ruling generation will soon all pass and this age of greed will cease and the earth can breath a sigh of relief, but no. It appears there are a long list of cunts who will happily sacrifice their children’s future and everybody else’s for the next few billion dollars. The 1% simply do not give a shit at all. They literally think, “Well I wont be here when the world burns, why should I care now?”
I think the term is making a comeback, it was abandoned to not offend global warming deniers. And it was instead called climate change. Because some parts of the globe can still get colder, and that is apparently too confusing for American Christian and Republican morons to understand.
It is and always was global warming that is the actual issue, so we should all go back to calling it that again.
We had a US Senator bring a fucking snowball onto the floor of the Senate to disprove global warming.
Yeah I remember, the idiocy of that is astounding.
It’s child logic
Couldn’t agree more. Well said.
The worst part is it wasn’t the 1980s, it was almost 100 years before when people first started understanding that humans could affect the climate.
<img alt="Newspaper article from early 1900s" src="https://sh.itjust.works/pictrs/image/5ad5ac2d-b33e-4dfe-b807-6612bb43b87c.jpeg">
I remember that image too, I was speaking from my perspective that the first time I remember being made aware of it was in the 1980s. I should have been more clear, sorry.
Haven’t like 9 of the last 10 years been record hot years? Not really going out on a limb here, UN.
Global population record will be smashed by 2030!
Not really, the global population is only growing slowly now.
So it’s misleading to call it “smashed”.
I feel like you may have missed the joke.
I mean it wasnt a particularly funny joke, but the sentence was designed to illustrate the absurdity of making an engaging headline from a predictable occurrence.
OK, But the headline of the article here does not contain such language as “smashed”, so IMO it’s a bit misplaced, but I get what you mean. Because the headline remains pretty stupid in being extremely obvious.
I know a guy that lamented all throughout Biden’s term that “the debt is the highest it’s ever been!” He truly didn’t understand how the US debt works. He also hasn’t cared that, to no one’s surprise but his own, the debt under trump’s current term is higher still.
Last year, just like every year prior to that since the 1950s, we’ve added the net population of the entire United Kingdom to this planet. All of those people consume, pollute and want a space to call their own. Just like the other 8.4 billion of us.
As a species, the environment hasn’t ever been our priority.
This is pretty close, and it is true that the population has been growing by about the same amount of people per year since the 1950’s. But the same amount of people means decreasing percentage, and that means slower.
But another significant factor is that in the industrialized world the growth had already almost completely stopped in the 50’s.
Now the growth is beginning to decrease in Asia, and the expectation is that after 2050 the growth will be only on Africa.
pewresearch: worlds-population-is-projected-to-nearly-stop-growing-by-the-end-of-the-century
Kind of true, but it definitely began to be in the 60’s in western democracies. other countries were a bit later, typically the priority of the environment follows when the economy reaches a certain level, where the balance between environment and more economy begin to shift.
Problem is that with the global environment, some countries like especially USA don’t give a shit. Despite they have contributed more to the problem than any other country in the world.
It’s odd to bring percentages into it as the other factors of the equation aren’t growing at the same rate. In fact, they are decreasing.
The absolute number of people continues to increase steadily, consuming more and more and more of the finite resources we have.
There are more humans on this planet today than have ever been on this planet in the past, and the same will be true for as long as our projections can reliably predict, and we have no intention to reduce that number.
I don’t think the word “slow” has any place in describing this growth unless one wishes to deliberately obfuscate it by using an exponential scale.
You obviously didn’t look at the link I provided, and no the declining percentage will eventually make it slow down. Zero percent is obviously zero, and no it’s not strange to bring that in, because it’s math.
I’m sorry I didn’t comment on your unrelated source. I think we agree that the population is continuing to grow until 2100, as the UN projected.
This just isn’t true btw. Nearly every single deomgrapher in the world predicts net zero population growth by 2050, and all the most well respected predict we’ll be at 1.8 or below fertility rate by 2050.
The population hasn’t been growing steadily since the 1990s.
What, exactly, is incorrect in my comment? There will be significantly more people in 2050 than there are today.
‘significantly more’ is around 10%, 20% if we solve climate change by 2050 btw.
That’s not that significant given we’re up 25% from 24 years ago.
But the important part is no, fertility rates have never been lower in world history, and they’re dropping faster than at any point in world history post-glacial-period-induced population squeeze. Most of the world is far below replacement, and the rest of the world is catching up thanks to the modernization of China and Africa.
By 2050 we will see a year where more humans die than are born. By 2100 there will be (actually) significantly fewer humans alive than there are today. We are two generations, at most, out from significant and rapid population decay, if not outright collapse.
Fertility rates, while interesting and relevant, were not what my comments were about.
My first comment made an observation that last year alone, we added the equivalent of the current population of the United Kingdom to the planet, and we’ve been doing that every year, for the past 70 years. (As an aside, I argue that the net addition is “significantly more.”)
My second comment remarked on the skewed perspective of looking at relative growth rates, which is why I specifically called out the human population in absolute numbers.
I fail to see how anything I’ve said is incorrect but I’m open to the feedback.
You were speaking about population growth. Fertility rate is the definition that we use for population growth and prediction.
I don’t believe you are reading any comments, or if you are you’re not understanding them because you believe you are right and there is no possible information that will ever make you believe otherwise.
Have a good life, it will be full of confusing and wonderful things that you will never be able to explain or understand.
I understand that, but again, that’s not the point of my comments. We’re talking about different things and I’m fully aware of lowering fertility rates.
I don’t know a better way to explain the motivation of my comments than that it is deliberately separating relative population growth (yes it absolutely has to do with fertility rates!) from absolute population growth.
I’ve been trying to encourage the reader to not think about fertility rates and just be in awe of the sheer amount of humans adding to the total population. The purpose of that thought experiment is to factor in that the growth shouldn’t be solely compared to a number from a previous period, because the growth doesn’t occur in a vacuum: the necessary resources here on Earth don’t grow at the same rate. Simply looking at a growth rate and saying it’s declining draws an extremely misleading picture.
I, too, genuinely wish you the best in life. However, I have no inclination to be passively aggressive about it.
It’s statistical proof that climate change will get worse in the next years regardless of what we do.
A definitive statement like that is rare in climatology.
(It’s still essential to fight against climate change, but even with 0 CO2 output starting today, it would continue to get hotter for many years, since the system reacts slowly).
top 11 hottest are 11 years since 2015. Top 3 are last 3.
I think it’s going to be a while. We’re still committed to the infinite growth paradigm and infinite growth requires infinite energy.
There’s debate about the feasibility of green growth, but the fact is green energy is already helping to fuel growth. It’s a relatively small percentage of the overall energy mix now, but green energy will grow, and so will fossil fuel energy. We’ll have green growth and fossil fuel growth, and probably nuclear growth, too. As long as we keep growing, we’ll need it all.
Infinite sacrifice.
I’m French and remember in the 70s/80s even 90s we never had 30+°C in fucking May. Now we have 35+ for days, multiple times a year, it’s incredible.
“incredible” is not usually used to mean “not credible” (or “not believable”) in English. It usually means “really good”. I’d go with “unbelievable” or “insane”, personally.
This might just be a North American thing though.
agree, “unbelievable” or “insane” are better, I am not an english native speaker :)
“incredible” works perfectly fine. Think of the phrase “He had incredible strength” meaning an unbelievably high measure of strength.
French has incroyable which means literally the same exact thing with the same root
Given the context, it seemed like the intent was different than simply “to a large extent”
I figured, which is the only reason I mentioned it!
On the contrary, this meaning is a newer thing. As recently as the 70s incredible and fantastic were used in place of unbelievable but not always in a positive way.
Which makes it even harder, as the dictionary definitions may suggest that they’re still used that way in popular usage. I haven’t heard “incredible” used negatively or neutrally (except ironically) in my entire life, which did begin in the 20th century.
These weren’t made in my lifetime but I have definitely heard that usage in 50-70s B-movies.
For instance “the destruction was incredible”.
Duh. 🤡
Are Americans really still denying global warming?
If they are, I don’t see why that crowd should be considered worth informing, they are clearly immune to reason and evidence.
Yeah, build a wall around them and don’t let any of them out. We’ll be better off
The fuck do you mean later this year we just had it like yesterday
FYI in statistical language “almost certainly” means with probability 1.
100% probability.
The math of measure theory allows for such an outcome to happen, just with immeasurably small chance.
Eh, I’ll just start running my AC lower and open the windows. Its fine guys.
Start hoarding water now.
Don’t think of it as the hottest year of the last 200 years. Think of it as the coldest year of the next 200
there were 23 and 24 records set. 25 was 3rd warmest year. Every year since 2015 is in the top all time list. I get the point that el nino will break record this or next year. But progression has bigger consequences than this headline.
Meaningless title, we are already breaking records every year for over a decade