yes! why is it surprising that climate change is not linear?
i get that we dont know the exact cause of this dramatic & sudden rise, but i'd guess many assumptions have been made about proportional effects
and ofc, we're carrying more CO2 in the atmosphere than earth ever has... a look at the record shows that historically, it was a much hotter planet when CO2 levels were anywhere near this high. maybe things 'catch up' in fits and starts
https://earth.org/data_visualization/a-brief-history-of-co2/
@rustoleumlove @alberto_cottica @rahmstorf
Because @rahmstorf has been part of the climate modelling community for decades and of course the models aren't in any way simplistic. If a central climate scientist says he is worried, because Earth got much hotter than expected and modeled ... then maybe it's worrisome. Extra worrisome.
@knud even the experts dont know everything. there will be unknown unknowns in climate change. as a scientist myself, i know they often tend to be *conservative* w opinons to reach consensus. ofc theyre now scared - we may be fckd
it's not possible to 'worry' a person like me anymore, who was worried back in the 90s & 00s. i didnt have kids, who would be adults now, in anticipation of a climate crisis. now, i'm just living my best life, expecting civilization might last until about 2050
I don't like "doomer" behavior. It's just another excuse to not become active.
It's us, it can be stopped.
@alberto_cottica @rustoleumlove @rahmstorf
Sure, but one needs a decent argument to choose a quickly diverging function over a linear one, no? So yes, one might get surprises, but in the end this means a physical mechanism or coupling that wasn't on people's radar so far. To find and include that will be important.
That might be one cause. I just heard that the recent reduction of pollutant emissions (which had a cooling effect) in shipping might now uncover a part of the GHG effects that until now have been kind of hidden/suppressed. So, this demonstrates one of the risks of certain geo engineering methods: If you stop them, you get almost immediately thrown back to the hothouse earth.
Darauf setze ich auch. Was passiert, wenn 50% des Erdgas, das in EU am Boden verfeuert werden sollte, plötzlich in großer Höhe abgefackelt würde oder wahlweise unverbrannt in die Atmosphäre gelangte?
Könnte das evtl den beobachteten Einfluss haben?
Bis ins benachbarte Finnland sind Berichten zufolge Flammen zu sehen, die wahrscheinlich von nicht verkauftem Erdgas stammen, das in Russland abgefackelt wird. Nasa-Aufnahmen sollen das seit Mitte Juni bestätigen. Moskau hat ein Problem, den weiterhin aus Gasfeldern fließenden Rohstoff zu verkaufen oder zwischenzulagern.
Ha. Methane. Look at this forecast comparison Sep 2020 vs Sep 2023 at 500hPa. The colour code hasn't changed in the 3 years. It's truly a different planet.
I wonder if the OH Radicals were all jailed together with the climate activists everywhere.
@anlomedad I wonder if it has to do something with hidden emissions in Turkmenistan discovered last year. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/may/09/mind-boggling-methane-emissions-from-turkmenistan-revealed
@anlomedad yes, I can imagine the pandemic and the war in Ukraine plays a role.
@herbert_tiemens
Might also have to do with atmospheric changes from the water vapour in the stratosphere that Hunga-Tonga ejected in January 2022 and which had distributed globally by end of 2022?
ECMWF Copernicus from which the pictured methane FOREcast is, also has a data model on past methane concentration in various altitudes. I should download the data and look for sudden changes anywhere since Sept 2020 on the ground and at 500hPa. Maybe a weekend project.
@herbert_tiemens
I plotted NOAA's monthly mean methane as the monthly year-on-year growth rate, meaning, the difference in concentration from June 2023 over June 2022.
There is a jump in the growth rate that begins in May 2020. From about 7ppb in previous Mays to 12ppb in 2020.
All following 2020 months have that jump, too. In the chart, 2020 is the last red bar before the blue bars begin which are 2021ff.
Going a month back to April. 2020 is still ~ normal at 10ppb. But the blue bar 2021 jumps to 15.
Even more pronounced in February and March 2021 where growthrates double over 2020.
But 2022 February and March are totally nuts. Compared to 2020 where they had a growthrate of 7 and 8 respectively over the previous year, in 2022, they now both jump to 21ppb.
What caused that? Except for Putler's war, I can't think of anything else, and the war didn't immediately cause venting of superfluous gas, did it? We all continued to buy off the sociopath until late summer, didn't we?
The sudden increase peters out in September 2022. Still higher than before Covid and Putler, but at a more linear rate, if we disregard the years in between.
Regarding 2023 up to June: still far outside normal growthrates but only half as bad. Phew.
You can download the data here and play with it to see more: https://gml.noaa.gov/ccgg/trends_ch4/
@stevesplace @rahmstorf
@anlomedad
Thank you! Fascinating to see this in graphs, it seems we are into something. I can think of venting of superfluous gas because of decline of oil and gas demand in 2020 due to lockdowns started mid March in Europe and some weeks later in America.
@GreenFire Do we know methane well? I thought it was far harder to get a good number for methane than we can for CO2. And that's the problem, we know it's going up a lot from sources everywhere, it's just a very broad range. The only "good" thing about the other GHGs is that their concentrations are far less even though they are far stronger per molecule. Unfortunately almost all of them are tied to feedback loops so it's all increasing.
The International Maritime Organization (IMO) implemented new regulations in 2020 that require ships to use low-sulphur fuel. This has led to a decrease in sulphur dioxide (SO2) emissions from shipping, which have a cooling effect on the atmosphere.
@Voka Ich lasse ergänzend wissenschaftliche Artikel da.
Detection of large-scale cloud microphysical changes within a major shipping corridor after implementation of the IMO 2020 fuel sulfur regulations. 2023. https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-23-8259-2023
Global reduction in ship-tracks from sulfur regulations for shipping fuel. 2022. https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.abn7988
Rapid saturation of cloud water adjustments to shipping emissions [Preprint]. 2023. https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2023-813
Abstract. New regulations from the International Maritime Organization (IMO) limiting sulfur emissions from the shipping industry are expected to have large benefits in terms of public health but may come with an undesired side effect: acceleration of global warming as the climate-cooling effects of ship pollution on marine clouds are diminished. Previous work has found a substantial decrease in the detection of ship tracks in clouds after the IMO 2020 regulations went into effect, but changes in large-scale cloud properties have been more equivocal. Using a statistical technique that estimates counterfactual fields of what large-scale cloud and radiative properties within an isolated shipping corridor in the southeastern Atlantic would have been in the absence of shipping, we confidently detect a reduction in the magnitude of cloud droplet effective radius decreases within the shipping corridor and find evidence for a reduction in the magnitude of cloud brightening as well. The instantaneous radiative forcing due to aerosol–cloud interactions from the IMO 2020 regulations is estimated as O(1 W m−2) within the shipping corridor, lending credence to global estimates of O(0.1 W m−2). In addition to their geophysical significance, our results also provide independent evidence for general compliance with the IMO 2020 regulations.
@rahmstorf we have at least heard of a combination of
- strong El Niño on
- weaker winds from Sahara to Atlantic (lower dust transport, more sunlight getting in)
- little mixing in the Atlantic (more heat at surface)
- cut sulphur emissions from cargo vessels
What I don't know is whether those elements are quantitatively sufficient to explain such a jump
Is this the time lag of the impact of CO2-concentration?
Is this the state of uncertainty after linearity, the dawn of a dynamic system?
@rahmstorf Brings to mind a phrase used by my old armchair Marxist buddies: "Qualitative change; quantitative leap."
Except this time it's for real.
Using R's decompose() function (just exploring it the first time), the certain september 2023 data does look less spectacular. This might calm down from panic mode.
Nevertheless the trend part looks bad enough...
...that's enough to be concerned anyway.
@rahmstorf
I liken it to the wobbling of a top as it looses momentum.
At first it wobbles ony a little, but it yaws and pitches wildly just before collapse.
I think that's where we're at. The beginning of the collapse phase..
But, my math is questionable, at best. I could be wrong. I hope I'm wrong.
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