Open Mind

Zeke Hausfather has reported that since 2014, CO₂ emissions have leveled off. Not only that, he has estimated how much that has reduced the atmospheric CO₂ load, compared to what is would have been if CO₂ emissions kept increasing like they had before. It does seem that emissions have plateaued for more than a decade now

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A recent preprint (not yet peer-reviewed) reports that when global average lower-troposphere temperature (TLT) is adjusted to remove the influence of ENSO (el Niño Southern Oscillation) and of aerosols, the resulting adjusted data reveal unambiguous acceleration during the period of record (from 1981 through 2025). This is no surprise, I’ve done that myself using surface temperature data. What is a surprise is the extremely high rates of recent warming and acceleration that the authors estimate, then project into the future. The first paragraph of their “Discussion” section says:

After removing ENSO and aerosol effects, robust and statistically significant post-2015 warming trends of up to 0.482 ± 0.113°C decade⁻¹ are identified across all satellite and reanalysis TLT datasets. Although substantial, this represents a conservative estimate. As an upper-end scenario, statistically significant acceleration emerges around 2000 and reaches ~ 0.4–0.5°C decade⁻² by 2024. These trends indicate that the 2023–2024 temperature jumps are part of an ongoing acceleration, amplified by El Niño, and imply an additional 0.5–1.0°C of warming over the next decade—roughly three to five times the 1981–2024 linear trend.

I’m skeptical.

I’m not skeptical about acceleration. I am skeptical that acceleration will continue, very skeptical that the globe will warm 0.5°C over the next decade, and the idea that it might heat by a full 1.0°C in that time, seems ludicrous.

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Behold.
The festering carcass of American rot shoved into an ill-fitting suit: the sleaze of a conman, the gluttony of a parasite, the racism of a Klansman, the sexism of a back-alley creep, the ignorance of a bar-stool drunk, and the greed of a hedge-fund ghoul — all spray-painted orange and paraded like a prize hog at a county fair. Not a president. Not even a man. Just the diseased distillation of everything this country swears it isn’t but has always been — arrogance dressed up as exceptionalism, stupidity passed off as common sense, cruelty sold as toughness, greed exalted as ambition, and corruption worshipped like gospel. It is America’s shadow made flesh, proving that when a nation kneels before money, power, and spite, it doesn’t just lose its soul — it shits out this bloated obscenity and calls it a leader.

— Oliver Kornetzke

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Last week, someone on a mailing list I belong to suggested that there might be a visible spike in CO₂ concentration, and wondered whether it was due to emissions from the war against Iran. It was based on daily data from the atmospheric observatory at Mauna Loa:

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Last month was the hottest March on record for CONUS (the CONtinental U.S., a.k.a. the “lower 48 states”), beating the previous record for monthly average temperature (from back in 2012), but only by 0.45°F.

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In the western U.S. this winter, temperature was far above normal; the region has been through its hottest winter on record, by a large margin. Here is the winter average temperature anomaly for a large area in the west which covers the Colorado river basin:

Hot winter temperatures dramatically increase the rate at which snow melts and water evaporates, and as if that weren’t bad enough, scorching heat has continued in March: they’re suffering through a record-breaking heat wave right now. Result: the snowpack is already dangerously low.

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Saturday my wife and I saw the movie Project Hail Mary, the story of unwilling astronaut Ryland Grace (portrayed by Ryan Gosling) and his mission to save us from a plague which threatens the source of life on Earth: the energy from the sun itself. It’s based on a popular novel of the same name by Andy Weir.

It’s an excellent film, with humor, heart-warming moments, and (spoiler alert) yes we succeed in saving the world. But I’m also enough of a geek to revel in the fact that it contains some science (some of which is fiction of course). There’s quite a bit more in the book, some involving the theory of relativity. You don’t need to be a science geek to enjoy the book or movie, but it doesn’t hurt, and if I get to do math that’s even better.

His mission requires travel to the star tau Ceti, 11.92 light-years away (a light year is a measure of distance equal to 9.46 x 10¹⁵ meters, the distance light can travel in 1 year). His ship maintains constant acceleration (which isn’t mentioned in the movie, but is in the book) at a rate of a = 1.5g, where g is the acceleration due to gravity at Earth’s surface. Constant acceleration creates artificial gravity on board the spaceship, and accelerating at 1.5 g means the artificial gravity is 1.5 times that at Earth’s surface. Using standard scientific units for distance (meters) and time (seconds), the acceleration due to gravity at Earth’s surface (Earth-normal gravity) is g = 9.80665 meters per second per second. For convenience I’ll use different units, measuring distance in light-years and time in years, in which case g = 1.03 light-years per year per year. How long does it take to reach tau Ceti at constant acceleration?

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Remember the Climate Working Group organized the the Dept. of Energy? The group which produced a report disputing the danger of climate change in general and CO₂ specifically? It seems they didn’t just gather together and take an objective look at the existing science. Instead, they planned ahead of time, and in secret, the undermine the existing science. And, they took steps to conceal what they were doing.

Since their work was done under the auspices of the U.S. government, sponsored and paid for by the dept. of Energy, they are subject to Freedom of Information laws, and that means that a lot of documents have been released as a result of a lawsuit by EDF (Environmental Defense Fund) and UCS (Union of Concerned Scientsts). You can view, search, and download the documents, over 100,000 pages of them.

Interesting reading.

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For Americans living in the eastern half of the country, this winter seemed quite cold, and for some states winter temperature was indeed colder than average (average defined by the period from 1895 to the present). Those states are shaded light blue in the following map. Shaded in light pink are states whose winter was hotter than average, orange for the states with a winter much hotter than average, and in deep red are the states that have just been through their hottest winter on record (graph courtesy of Climate at a Glance).

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My paper with Stefan Rahmstorf showing that global warming has accelerated was published in Geophysical Research Letters today. The main result is that global warming is NOT proceeding at the same old rate it has been since 1975. It’s going faster.

The Guardian has a good article about it. It points out that our estimate is faster than that of other experts, and quotes some of them who express caveats. Honestly, I agree with most of their caveats — I think that the rate over the last 10 years is quite high but isn’t likely to sustain for very long. The truly important point is what we and (almost) all seem to agree on: that the warming rate really has increased. The latest year’s data — which didn’t make it into our study — only strengthens that conclusion.

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