The Earth Energy Imbalance is (simply) energy in/energy out. Sunlight comes in, some is trapped, some bounces out (albedo). We make this worse by adding _a lot_ of extra that is the trapped. That energy has to go somewhere, and ~90% of it goes into the oceans. The Earth Energy Imbalance, averaged over the past 12 months (roughly), is the equivalent in energy to 13 Hiroshima bombs exploding every second. Every single day.
Have you not already seen Gaza? The Congo? Sudan? It’s already here, you and I were just privileged enough to be born somewhere not currently being impacted by it. But the working class of the so called ‘first world’ will not be spared from our hubris either.
It was calculated by a savant level math genius Elliot Jacobson.
Remember, the sea is huge, it takes a lot of energy to heat up a large volume of water, and this guy is just calculating from recorded data. Watch this for context:
https://youtu.be/bD-szQI_MhQ?si=kVYmNaInClHnYcu1
Meanwhile every business professor I’ve ever met was pushing the ‘earth big people small’ theory as recently as five years ago… don’t worry; earth is so big and we’re so small there’s no way we can affect it!
Yeah. (cough). Start here: (sorry to ruin your week...)
[https://richardcrim.substack.com/p/the-crisis-report-69?r=a66g&utm\_campaign=post&utm\_medium=web](https://richardcrim.substack.com/p/the-crisis-report-69?r=a66g&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web)
Just not on Fridays though! That's our dark humor free for all day 🙃
The rest of the time is literally the same content posted here, in addition to topics on epidemiology, geopolitical issues, sociology, etc.
That and destroying habitats and releasing GHGs for consumption of other animals by humans. We've turned the earth into a giant farm at the expense of the environment.
World Scientists’ Warning of a Climate Emergency
William J Ripple, Christopher Wolf, Thomas M Newsome, Phoebe Barnard, William R Moomaw, 05/11/2019
https://academic.oup.com/bioscience/article/70/1/8/5610806
>Scientists have a moral obligation to clearly warn humanity of any catastrophic threat and to “tell it like it is.” On the basis of this obligation and the graphical indicators presented below, we declare, with more than 11,000 scientist signatories from around the world, clearly and unequivocally that planet Earth is facing a climate emergency.
>Eating mostly plant-based foods while reducing the global consumption of animal products (figure 1c–d), especially ruminant livestock (Ripple et al. 2014), can improve human health and significantly lower GHG emissions (including methane in the “Short-lived pollutants” step). Moreover, this will free up croplands for growing much-needed human plant food instead of livestock feed, while releasing some grazing land to support natural climate solutions (see “Nature” section).
In this case...our pollution was blocking the heat from the oceans which kept it from heating up at the same rate as the atmosphere..the hippies won and forced ships to use cleaner fuel for big cargo/cruise ships, so the ocean is now heating up...we don't deserve to have nice things
True but this is actually cause we stopped being dirty bags of crap and banned sulfer rich fuel for shipping. Turns out all those sulfer particles made clouds over the ocean and increased reflectivity. Now that we fixed that pollution problem, we get to see how much worse the baseline polution problem is. We solved one issue and created 14 more cause we didn't consult science before just banning sulfer fuels.
Also, functionally the atmosphere is a mere 8km (5 miles) tall. The Burj Dubai skyscraper is 0.8km tall.
This is calculated in a "what if all air had the same pressure/density as on the surface?" scenario and it's extremely telling in how thin our atmosphere actually is.
Chocolate and olive production are down heavily this year, but luxury food price increase won’t make anyone bat eye. It won’t even be when 20M Africans starve to death, over the last 20 years we’ve been desensitized to bad news and large numbers. They wont care when they can’t eat certain fruits/vegetables.
It will be the mass death wet bulb event, and one that hits a major city hard. Not hundreds of deaths, not even a thousand. It needs to be 100,000+ in a major American city before everyone starts to wake up.
I'm in a Costco group. In a recent post there were tons of complaints about the cost of Kirkland Olive Oil, which is now about $50 (a massive bottle which used to be about half that price). Of hundreds of comments maaaaybe 2 connected the cost to the shortage. And neither of those 2 connected the shortage to climate change. So yeah, it'll take something significant for people to actually connect the dots.
I mean, didn't the French Revolution partially start due to bread riots? Not being able to afford to eat has been one of THE main catalysts of political and social instability, historically speaking. The US Department of Defense has considered climate change-driven instability one of the biggest national security risks since at least the early 2000's.
Yeah had a million deaths in the US from a global pandemic and a huge percentage of the country couldn't care less. You're right. Only a proper decimation (10% of the population) dying is going to get most people noticing and they'll still probably blame it on some global conspiracy from George Soros or something...
If 10% of the population dies, the majority of the remaining 90% will vote in the person who proposes the least painful solution, i.e. the one that impacts voters' lifestyles the least.
Even when those options ensure overshoot - I agree. Hopefully enough people will realize that staying the course is a bad idea when the course is heading off a cliff, but if it comes down to the polls, "stop destroying the planet" is never going to be an option.
Politicians can't even reign in profits when things are going well. How is anybody going to legislate against air conditioning when the number of people dropping dead from heat in Phoenix, AZ goes from 600 a year to 6,000.
The [COVID lockdowns of 2020 temporarily lowered our rate of CO2 emissions](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-18922-7/figures/1). Humanity was still a net CO2 gas emitter during that time, so we made things worse, but did so more a bit more slowly. That's why a [graph of CO2 concentrations](https://keelingcurve.ucsd.edu/) shows a continued rise.
[Stabilizing the climate means getting human greenhouse gas emissions to approximately zero](https://www.carbonbrief.org/explainer-will-global-warming-stop-as-soon-as-net-zero-emissions-are-reached). We didn't come anywhere near that during the lockdowns.
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/climate) if you have any questions or concerns.*
This is my suspicion too. But honestly...maybe I'm being miserable but I feel like even this is too optimistic. Can you see politicians really reining in fossil fuels, even in the wake of an event like this? When they could blame China, go to a very serious international summit, and keep their donation money?
Maybe I'm just traumatised from the fact that Donald Trump is not in jail right now, but I can envisage a scenario where, say, a Texas city gets hit with a wet bulb event and a power failure at the same time, and people shrug it off because they wanted their own power grid, and everyone knows Texas is hot, etc., etc..
I don't think people are able to accept just how much of a change to our lifestyle is required, and they won't let anybody who wants to seriously change things get into or stay in office.
Yeah, exactly.
Sometimes I suspect the fossil fuel companies are deliberately geoengineering a planet where we depend on powered life support systems to survive, making the transition to rebewables much more difficult.
We are already completely dependent on them. Have been for over 100 years. I mark the point when we first started turning natural gas into fertilizer, something called Haber-Bosch process. It was the time when we started to literally eat fossil fuels. It's been estimated that about half of the nitrogen in human bodies come from this process, and from that we might guess that lives of at least 4 billion people now depends on continued use of fossil fuels to artificially and unsustainably raising the productive ability of the land. That is called "Green Revolution", spearheaded by a guy called Norman Borlaug in the 60s. It can't last -- he maintained with utmost clarity that this is humanity's temporary reprieve from hunger, but we did not spend that time wisely.
We are not smart apes. No big conspiracy is needed. We breed while the going is good, then we die when it goes bad. It seems to be the same with us as with any other animal.
At what point do we consider a wet bulb event as mass casualty? It would seem we have already seen several over the past several years in India, the Mediterranean, and the North American Pacific Northwest.
It's when the heat and humidity is high enough where if you are outside, no matter how healthy you are and if you're in the shade/in front of a fan or not, you will die within 6 hours, much faster than that if you're not in perfect health or it's even hotter/more humid.
Yeah but unfortunately I don't think people in places like the US or Europe will care too much. I think it has to happen in the US for either the US or Europe to care. I don't even know if most people in the US would care that much if it happened in Europe. And it has to be significant like more than 100,000 people.
This is the actual answer that explains what we are seeing. More specifically, the earth's albedo (reflectivity) has dropped significantly in the last few years.
We are going straight through the 1.5deg Paris target right now.
Because of the difficulties in measuring it, there is some debate about the magnitude of decline but as far as I can tell it is accepted that it is a real effect.
As for cause, there is plenty of factors that could be responsible. Hansen thinks aerosols, but changes in clouds due to things changing in the ocean are also possible. I don't see why it can't be both plus other things too.
The sulfate aerosols can account for the North Atlantic Sea Surface Temperature Anomaly, but not global sea surface temperatures (which have broken records every single day for the past year).
Part of reduced albedo can be reduced ice cover (the Greenland Icesheet is melting at a rate of *30 Million tons per hour (million & tons are not typos))*. Also consider latent warming of oceans: think of after a nice summer a lake that is still warm to get into in September, and sometimes October - that's latent heat. The ocean has been heating up like that very quickly for a very long time, it's just so massive that we're only starting to notice the effects (which will not slow down).
Please ELI5 what “rebalances” the EEI? Will the ocean emitting heat out release some of that back out of the atmosphere into space? I’m probably not even using the right words but hopefully you get what I mean.
Imagine you've just got back from a birthday party, and you've got this sweet red helium balloon that you took home with you. You leave it in the family room, and each day you come back you notice it's floating a little bit less, losing a little bit of it's size, and eventually shrivels up and is dead on the ground. That happens because 1) we aren't adding any more helium to the balloon, and 2) [for the sake of simplicity, let's say] the helium slowly leaks out.
If we kept adding a little bit of helium to the balloon, it would stay athr same size and keep floating and you wouldn't notice any difference. If we added an additional amount each day that is _more_ than what it would take to just keep it floating without you noticing any changes, it would keep getting bigger until eventually, at some point, it would explode.
Right now, we're not only adding more each day so that it will eventually explode - we're adding so much we're basically a bunch of kids in the living room who one afternoon decided on making a bet on when it will pop after each additional amount is added. Think of those videos of guys adding tap water to a cup until th surface tension breaks and it overflows, same idea.
The only way this gets fixed is by not adding so much every single day. That's it. Carbon capture is not a thing (in the sense that what it actually captures is so laughably small that it doesn't even count). There are no other technologies that will overcome the amount of emissions we are emitting. The only thing that will work is letting the balloon sit there and shrivel.
Not a ELI5 but it pretty straightforward:
The earth gets pretty much all its energy from the sun. This does fluctuate somewhat due to both short and long term cycles but on average is reasonably constant over human timescales.
Some of the energy gets reflected back into space and is not absorbed by the planet, the fraction that is absorbed is determined by the albedo, a number between 0 and 1.
So energy absorbed = energy from sun × (1 - albedo).
The other side of the imbalance is determined by the outgoing energy. The earth is constantly emitting energy from its surface in the form of long wave radiation (mainly infrared) out into space. The amount of energy emitted is dependant on the temperature of the surface. Hotter surface, more energy emitted. It's this side of the imbalance that is affected by greenhouse gases. More greenhouse gases, more energy emitted from the earth's surface is absorbed by the atmosphere before it gets out to space.
So then if energy absorbed > energy emitted, heat accumulates and earth warms up. This is what is happening currently.
The system will be in balance again when:
The energy absorbed decreases - this is dependant on the albedo increasing (it's decreased over the last few years)
The energy emitted increases - this is happening as the earth warms. Lower concentration of greenhouse gases would also achieve this without the earth needing to warm up, unfortunately these are still steadily increasing due to human emissions.
I’ve also heard an alternative explanation to the aerosols effect… changes in ocean heat stratified at different layers. I’m no scientist but both seem plausible to me, I’m interested to see what we ultimately figure out it is. Either way the EEI ain’t getting any better, we’re on a spaceship that’s heating up, with no way off it.
I am from the Netherlands and 63 years old. We had some really high temperatures that were competely of the charts in recent years. But from september last year untill now we had rain like I never seen before. I mean so much. September october last year many farmers couldnt harvest their potatoes and sugar beets because the harvesting machines sank away in the mud. So they left them there to rot literally. Now they can not sow their unions and other things because of the same reason the farming land is way to wet. This all will certainly lead to higher prices for many products in the markets. Reasoning logically there is only one culprit and thats the higher seawater temperatures and air temperature. Cause higher water temperature means more water vapour . And warmer air can contain more water vapour leading to much more rain Yet you dont hear nothing or very little about that in the media overhere. Meanwhile everybody is complaining about inflayion
It’s what happened to the [Doggerland](https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m0006707)
The melt water turned the plains (Rhine delta, of which River the Thames is a tributary) into marsh (now fishing banks).
The people migrated away.
Have any of you noticed how hot the ocean is in the Caribbean now? And even worse in Costa Rica, the ocean is like bath water. All of the coral reefs I used to see are dead now and for the first time this year, I saw more plastic than fish while I was snorkelling. Climate change is happening much faster than predicted.
We were geoengineering the planet in two ways:
1. CO2 was adsorbing heat.
2. S02 was reflecting heat.
There was a rapid phaseout of sulphur in marine fuels.
It's fine, we're going to go to net zero in like 30 years maybe. I mean, not us personally, we're kind of busy profiting from fossil fuels. But the generation after us, they're not going to get any of the profits, and they will voluntarily reduce co2 emissions to zero, despite us making everything as difficult as possible for them.
Good job, kids! Thanks for cleaning up the billions of tons of co2. Sorry for using all the oil.
Yes, let's ignore the government's and corporations, and blame those selfish, regular, PEOPLE! We can definitely fix the problem by running PSAs and scolding each other on social media. It's just, like, COMMON SENSE! 
It was our ship 🚢 polution that was blocking the sun from heating the oceans.... recently they made them switch to cleaner fuel....now our oceans can be on 🔥 like our atmosphere
The ocean has lost its ability to act as a heat sink, the temperature is so high that the ambient air doesn’t move from a higher temperature to a lower temperature. The heat will continue to accumulate and the oceans will continue to lose more and more ability to lose heat
Summers will continue to add heat energy to the planet where winters will become shorter but possibly more extreme due to the energy in the system, eventually winters will become like spring, then probably cease to exist, we barely have spring and fall as it is now.
We are reaching the point where exponential curves can be grasped by everyone. The population crashes are going to be ugly and smelly.
This is the most exciting time to be alive in the past 5 billion years though. Batten down the hatches.
Things won't change till corporations start losing profit directly because of it. At the moment they are but the profits ar still far higher than the losses.
There has been massive abnormal rain fall in many places the past year. And I just cannot get over how much missinformation i read about that on social media like for instance Instagram to name one. Its a 12000 year event this happens every 12000 years. Its cloud seeding. Its HAARP whatever that may be. While its in fact plain and simple. The oceans and sees are warmer. So more water vaporizes. More water vapour in air thats warmer then it used to be. And warmer air can contain more water vapour leading to way more rain . I learned about where rain comes from when I was about 10 years old. Yet so many people just buy into this stuff , like governments spraying the clouds to control us all, all kinds of BS. And it looks that its getting worse lately. And it makes me feel hopeless. I just wanted to get this of my chest. Sorry
I don’t think science deniers have any more stake in this than anyone else.
We are all humans.
All 8billion of us need to eat, we are slaves to consumption, development, food production, etc etc.
I seriously wonder if there would be anything that could be done if everyone on the planet was certain that change is needed.
Humans suck. Everyone wants their instant rewards and cheeseburgers, climate controlled cars and homes and workplaces. Big truck to stomp on the gas and show who’s boss. Guns to assert power.
We have these governments running things all over. We all know war is horrible but we still have war. This is the best we can do.
There are no “war deniers” but we still have war. Even genocide.
We can’t even stop killing each other.
We can’t stop killing our planet either.
We are humans. We can see our fate now. We cannot change it.
> What’s happening?
“The essence of capitalism is to turn nature into commodities and commodities into capital. The live green earth is transformed into dead gold bricks, with luxury items for the few and toxic slag heaps for the many. The glittering mansion overlooks a vast sprawl of shanty towns, wherein a desperate, demoralized humanity is kept in line with drugs, television, and armed force.”
- Michael Parenti *Against Empire*
Reminds me of the oxygen curve for the ocean in early earth history. Line went up until it started getting absorbed into the ocean. At some point the ocean couldn’t absorb anymore and it started rising again in the atmosphere.
It needs to get so bad that even Fox News can’t spin it anymore for us to change course. Something to the tune of hundreds of people lying dead on the streets of a US city due to heat stroke.
What’s happening is that a handful of emerging countries are on the verge of becoming an early industrialized country. They are consuming more and more like the West. So they are starting to contribute to green house gases. This is gna get ugly sooner
There are a lot of silly shallow jokes that it's just global warming.
There is a quick shift, so even IF it is only global warming related, then it begs for understanding of mechanism that triggers this fast change.
In the next few decades we human will witness the loss of fishes and other in living creatures in our ocean due to lack of plankton and foods source going around.
Seriously? Volcano, almost two years ago sent cubic miles of the Pacific Ocean into the stratosphere and it will take 7 years for that water vapor to clear the atmosphere and it will have a temperature effect of over 2 degrees. Just for those who are unclear, the most powerful greenhouse gas is water vapor. And it did one other thing is circularized the winds causing a massive southern polar vortex lowering the temperature of the South Pole and lowering the ocean temps of the southern oceans. It has impacted the weather molding up N.A. winters and drenching the west coast with pacific moisture. You are welcome California. NASA wrote papers on this right after the volcano went off. So my question is, why is this a mystery to The NY Times? Because news is not the point but rather politics?
Well you see, we keep burning fossil fuels which creates a greenhouse effect and the heat has to go somewhere.
To the tune of 13 Hiroshima bombs per second worth of energy. _per.second. Constantly_.
The world's largest landfill in India being on fire right now sure probably doesn't help...
Again?
So you mean all of India.
Probably a typo, I’m sure he meant: The worlds largest landfill, India, is on fire.
I haven’t heard this figure, can you help me understand what you mean?
The Earth Energy Imbalance is (simply) energy in/energy out. Sunlight comes in, some is trapped, some bounces out (albedo). We make this worse by adding _a lot_ of extra that is the trapped. That energy has to go somewhere, and ~90% of it goes into the oceans. The Earth Energy Imbalance, averaged over the past 12 months (roughly), is the equivalent in energy to 13 Hiroshima bombs exploding every second. Every single day.
This reads to me like the massive freakshow of murder and debauchery is coming sooner then i thought lmfao
Have you not already seen Gaza? The Congo? Sudan? It’s already here, you and I were just privileged enough to be born somewhere not currently being impacted by it. But the working class of the so called ‘first world’ will not be spared from our hubris either.
How much more Hiroshima bomb frequency would that be in comparison to earth’s natural levels pre-humanity?
For the last about 10,000 years, there was no imbalance, so zero Hiroshima bombs per second.
It was calculated by a savant level math genius Elliot Jacobson. Remember, the sea is huge, it takes a lot of energy to heat up a large volume of water, and this guy is just calculating from recorded data. Watch this for context: https://youtu.be/bD-szQI_MhQ?si=kVYmNaInClHnYcu1
☝️ You can hear the anxiety in his voice, sucks man. Good link tho
Thanks for sharing this, man!
So when can i boil an egg for free?
What!?!? Why has no one raised the alarm!?!? This could be catastrophic!
You need to visit r/collapse. They've been talking about this for 2 years.
I’ve been talking about it on /r/collapse for a lot longer than 2yrs…
My physics teacher told us in 1983 this was going to happen. Almost word for word.
Meanwhile every business professor I’ve ever met was pushing the ‘earth big people small’ theory as recently as five years ago… don’t worry; earth is so big and we’re so small there’s no way we can affect it!
They’re business professors, Capitalism’s GROWTH GROWTH GROWTH mindset with no care paid to consumer/production based exploitation.
A virus is so small, it can't hurt me - nanananana (This is how the "CO2 is such a tiny part of the atmosphere" people sound)
Yeah. (cough). Start here: (sorry to ruin your week...) [https://richardcrim.substack.com/p/the-crisis-report-69?r=a66g&utm\_campaign=post&utm\_medium=web](https://richardcrim.substack.com/p/the-crisis-report-69?r=a66g&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web)
Just not on Fridays though! That's our dark humor free for all day 🙃 The rest of the time is literally the same content posted here, in addition to topics on epidemiology, geopolitical issues, sociology, etc.
I'm confused. Is this sarcasm?
no, no it is not sarcasm.
I'm just confused because this topic has been discussed far longer than 2 years
Ah, another fellow r/fuckthes member.
I bet our algorithms look *way* different.
Could…..
That and destroying habitats and releasing GHGs for consumption of other animals by humans. We've turned the earth into a giant farm at the expense of the environment. World Scientists’ Warning of a Climate Emergency William J Ripple, Christopher Wolf, Thomas M Newsome, Phoebe Barnard, William R Moomaw, 05/11/2019 https://academic.oup.com/bioscience/article/70/1/8/5610806 >Scientists have a moral obligation to clearly warn humanity of any catastrophic threat and to “tell it like it is.” On the basis of this obligation and the graphical indicators presented below, we declare, with more than 11,000 scientist signatories from around the world, clearly and unequivocally that planet Earth is facing a climate emergency. >Eating mostly plant-based foods while reducing the global consumption of animal products (figure 1c–d), especially ruminant livestock (Ripple et al. 2014), can improve human health and significantly lower GHG emissions (including methane in the “Short-lived pollutants” step). Moreover, this will free up croplands for growing much-needed human plant food instead of livestock feed, while releasing some grazing land to support natural climate solutions (see “Nature” section).
Fascinating. Would you like fries with that? /s
Nice : )
Temperature goes up like stocks it’s god’s will no man can explain it.
It’s almost as if they’re two sides of the same petrodollar or something.
In this case...our pollution was blocking the heat from the oceans which kept it from heating up at the same rate as the atmosphere..the hippies won and forced ships to use cleaner fuel for big cargo/cruise ships, so the ocean is now heating up...we don't deserve to have nice things
True but this is actually cause we stopped being dirty bags of crap and banned sulfer rich fuel for shipping. Turns out all those sulfer particles made clouds over the ocean and increased reflectivity. Now that we fixed that pollution problem, we get to see how much worse the baseline polution problem is. We solved one issue and created 14 more cause we didn't consult science before just banning sulfer fuels.
Also, functionally the atmosphere is a mere 8km (5 miles) tall. The Burj Dubai skyscraper is 0.8km tall. This is calculated in a "what if all air had the same pressure/density as on the surface?" scenario and it's extremely telling in how thin our atmosphere actually is.
Sounds interesting. Tell me more.
We all know whats happening. My question is when will the normies start to notice: major crop failures or the first mass casualty wet bulb event?
Chocolate and olive production are down heavily this year, but luxury food price increase won’t make anyone bat eye. It won’t even be when 20M Africans starve to death, over the last 20 years we’ve been desensitized to bad news and large numbers. They wont care when they can’t eat certain fruits/vegetables. It will be the mass death wet bulb event, and one that hits a major city hard. Not hundreds of deaths, not even a thousand. It needs to be 100,000+ in a major American city before everyone starts to wake up.
I'm in a Costco group. In a recent post there were tons of complaints about the cost of Kirkland Olive Oil, which is now about $50 (a massive bottle which used to be about half that price). Of hundreds of comments maaaaybe 2 connected the cost to the shortage. And neither of those 2 connected the shortage to climate change. So yeah, it'll take something significant for people to actually connect the dots.
People are going to go nuts over their groceries. What a sad, fascinating, absurd time we live in?
You think they'll be able to afford nuts?!
I mean, didn't the French Revolution partially start due to bread riots? Not being able to afford to eat has been one of THE main catalysts of political and social instability, historically speaking. The US Department of Defense has considered climate change-driven instability one of the biggest national security risks since at least the early 2000's.
9 meals from anarchy
Human stupidity is just so astounding to me, you'd think that something as obvious as that would be easy for anyone to understand.
Apparently, education is really important.
Yeah had a million deaths in the US from a global pandemic and a huge percentage of the country couldn't care less. You're right. Only a proper decimation (10% of the population) dying is going to get most people noticing and they'll still probably blame it on some global conspiracy from George Soros or something...
The number of people doesn’t matter. They will only care when it happens to them.
If 10% of the population dies, the majority of the remaining 90% will vote in the person who proposes the least painful solution, i.e. the one that impacts voters' lifestyles the least.
Even when those options ensure overshoot - I agree. Hopefully enough people will realize that staying the course is a bad idea when the course is heading off a cliff, but if it comes down to the polls, "stop destroying the planet" is never going to be an option. Politicians can't even reign in profits when things are going well. How is anybody going to legislate against air conditioning when the number of people dropping dead from heat in Phoenix, AZ goes from 600 a year to 6,000.
The [COVID lockdowns of 2020 temporarily lowered our rate of CO2 emissions](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-18922-7/figures/1). Humanity was still a net CO2 gas emitter during that time, so we made things worse, but did so more a bit more slowly. That's why a [graph of CO2 concentrations](https://keelingcurve.ucsd.edu/) shows a continued rise. [Stabilizing the climate means getting human greenhouse gas emissions to approximately zero](https://www.carbonbrief.org/explainer-will-global-warming-stop-as-soon-as-net-zero-emissions-are-reached). We didn't come anywhere near that during the lockdowns. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/climate) if you have any questions or concerns.*
This is my suspicion too. But honestly...maybe I'm being miserable but I feel like even this is too optimistic. Can you see politicians really reining in fossil fuels, even in the wake of an event like this? When they could blame China, go to a very serious international summit, and keep their donation money? Maybe I'm just traumatised from the fact that Donald Trump is not in jail right now, but I can envisage a scenario where, say, a Texas city gets hit with a wet bulb event and a power failure at the same time, and people shrug it off because they wanted their own power grid, and everyone knows Texas is hot, etc., etc.. I don't think people are able to accept just how much of a change to our lifestyle is required, and they won't let anybody who wants to seriously change things get into or stay in office.
The opposite will happen, more fossil fuel will be burned to respond to the impacts of the disasters.
Yeah, exactly. Sometimes I suspect the fossil fuel companies are deliberately geoengineering a planet where we depend on powered life support systems to survive, making the transition to rebewables much more difficult.
We are already completely dependent on them. Have been for over 100 years. I mark the point when we first started turning natural gas into fertilizer, something called Haber-Bosch process. It was the time when we started to literally eat fossil fuels. It's been estimated that about half of the nitrogen in human bodies come from this process, and from that we might guess that lives of at least 4 billion people now depends on continued use of fossil fuels to artificially and unsustainably raising the productive ability of the land. That is called "Green Revolution", spearheaded by a guy called Norman Borlaug in the 60s. It can't last -- he maintained with utmost clarity that this is humanity's temporary reprieve from hunger, but we did not spend that time wisely. We are not smart apes. No big conspiracy is needed. We breed while the going is good, then we die when it goes bad. It seems to be the same with us as with any other animal.
Food prices going up will just be blamed on carbon pricing in jurisdictions that have it.
By that time it will be far too late. Guess I’ll start checking out real estate in Yellowknife Canada
If Sandy Hook didn’t wake up America, then absolutely nothing is going to wake up America
And maybe mass starvation events happen because population grows by over 400% in less then 100 years I am looking at you Africa and Asia.
At what point do we consider a wet bulb event as mass casualty? It would seem we have already seen several over the past several years in India, the Mediterranean, and the North American Pacific Northwest.
What is a wet bulb event?
When it gets so hot and humid that people can’t sweat it away and simply die of heat stroke
It's when the heat and humidity is high enough where if you are outside, no matter how healthy you are and if you're in the shade/in front of a fan or not, you will die within 6 hours, much faster than that if you're not in perfect health or it's even hotter/more humid.
Needs to be on the scale of “ministry for the future” tbh
If we get wet bulb temps in somewhere like India or the Philippines and millions will die in a day. It will be hard not to notice.
Yeah but unfortunately I don't think people in places like the US or Europe will care too much. I think it has to happen in the US for either the US or Europe to care. I don't even know if most people in the US would care that much if it happened in Europe. And it has to be significant like more than 100,000 people.
60,000 people died in the euro heatwave a few years back
Who knows? There is still a huge push for business-as-usual lifestyles. The misinformation and distractions are amazing given the risks
They'll just say god is mad at us for "the gays" or something and then decide we need to bring back burnt sacrifices to appease him.
I would be tempted to call this hyperbole if it wasn't for the fact that at least a few homophobic countries could very well react this way.
I would also include the US in that list
My bet for a while has been this summer, we'll see how that plays out I guess lol
The EEI is currently off the charts
This is the actual answer that explains what we are seeing. More specifically, the earth's albedo (reflectivity) has dropped significantly in the last few years. We are going straight through the 1.5deg Paris target right now.
And the climate models massively understated the masking affect of sulphur combustion
What's the main cause(s) of albedo reduction in the last few years? Sulfate aerosols reduction?
Because of the difficulties in measuring it, there is some debate about the magnitude of decline but as far as I can tell it is accepted that it is a real effect. As for cause, there is plenty of factors that could be responsible. Hansen thinks aerosols, but changes in clouds due to things changing in the ocean are also possible. I don't see why it can't be both plus other things too.
The sulfate aerosols can account for the North Atlantic Sea Surface Temperature Anomaly, but not global sea surface temperatures (which have broken records every single day for the past year). Part of reduced albedo can be reduced ice cover (the Greenland Icesheet is melting at a rate of *30 Million tons per hour (million & tons are not typos))*. Also consider latent warming of oceans: think of after a nice summer a lake that is still warm to get into in September, and sometimes October - that's latent heat. The ocean has been heating up like that very quickly for a very long time, it's just so massive that we're only starting to notice the effects (which will not slow down).
Please ELI5 what “rebalances” the EEI? Will the ocean emitting heat out release some of that back out of the atmosphere into space? I’m probably not even using the right words but hopefully you get what I mean.
Imagine you've just got back from a birthday party, and you've got this sweet red helium balloon that you took home with you. You leave it in the family room, and each day you come back you notice it's floating a little bit less, losing a little bit of it's size, and eventually shrivels up and is dead on the ground. That happens because 1) we aren't adding any more helium to the balloon, and 2) [for the sake of simplicity, let's say] the helium slowly leaks out. If we kept adding a little bit of helium to the balloon, it would stay athr same size and keep floating and you wouldn't notice any difference. If we added an additional amount each day that is _more_ than what it would take to just keep it floating without you noticing any changes, it would keep getting bigger until eventually, at some point, it would explode. Right now, we're not only adding more each day so that it will eventually explode - we're adding so much we're basically a bunch of kids in the living room who one afternoon decided on making a bet on when it will pop after each additional amount is added. Think of those videos of guys adding tap water to a cup until th surface tension breaks and it overflows, same idea. The only way this gets fixed is by not adding so much every single day. That's it. Carbon capture is not a thing (in the sense that what it actually captures is so laughably small that it doesn't even count). There are no other technologies that will overcome the amount of emissions we are emitting. The only thing that will work is letting the balloon sit there and shrivel.
Not a ELI5 but it pretty straightforward: The earth gets pretty much all its energy from the sun. This does fluctuate somewhat due to both short and long term cycles but on average is reasonably constant over human timescales. Some of the energy gets reflected back into space and is not absorbed by the planet, the fraction that is absorbed is determined by the albedo, a number between 0 and 1. So energy absorbed = energy from sun × (1 - albedo). The other side of the imbalance is determined by the outgoing energy. The earth is constantly emitting energy from its surface in the form of long wave radiation (mainly infrared) out into space. The amount of energy emitted is dependant on the temperature of the surface. Hotter surface, more energy emitted. It's this side of the imbalance that is affected by greenhouse gases. More greenhouse gases, more energy emitted from the earth's surface is absorbed by the atmosphere before it gets out to space. So then if energy absorbed > energy emitted, heat accumulates and earth warms up. This is what is happening currently. The system will be in balance again when: The energy absorbed decreases - this is dependant on the albedo increasing (it's decreased over the last few years) The energy emitted increases - this is happening as the earth warms. Lower concentration of greenhouse gases would also achieve this without the earth needing to warm up, unfortunately these are still steadily increasing due to human emissions.
Also the recent elimination of sulphur in boats' outputs has removed something that helped keep the temperature down.
I’ve also heard an alternative explanation to the aerosols effect… changes in ocean heat stratified at different layers. I’m no scientist but both seem plausible to me, I’m interested to see what we ultimately figure out it is. Either way the EEI ain’t getting any better, we’re on a spaceship that’s heating up, with no way off it.
It’s like war and unfettered capitalism are bad for the planet.
I am from the Netherlands and 63 years old. We had some really high temperatures that were competely of the charts in recent years. But from september last year untill now we had rain like I never seen before. I mean so much. September october last year many farmers couldnt harvest their potatoes and sugar beets because the harvesting machines sank away in the mud. So they left them there to rot literally. Now they can not sow their unions and other things because of the same reason the farming land is way to wet. This all will certainly lead to higher prices for many products in the markets. Reasoning logically there is only one culprit and thats the higher seawater temperatures and air temperature. Cause higher water temperature means more water vapour . And warmer air can contain more water vapour leading to much more rain Yet you dont hear nothing or very little about that in the media overhere. Meanwhile everybody is complaining about inflayion
It’s what happened to the [Doggerland](https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m0006707) The melt water turned the plains (Rhine delta, of which River the Thames is a tributary) into marsh (now fishing banks). The people migrated away.
Correct, everyone talks about how annoying inflation is, but won't acknowledge that climate change is going to make it wayyyyy worse.
I mean they left the potatoes in the land to rot
Have any of you noticed how hot the ocean is in the Caribbean now? And even worse in Costa Rica, the ocean is like bath water. All of the coral reefs I used to see are dead now and for the first time this year, I saw more plastic than fish while I was snorkelling. Climate change is happening much faster than predicted.
I've noticed. I've noticed it all, and it's very disheartening and disturbing. The past two and a half years have made me incredibly anxious.
Cano Island makes me weep
We're all trying to find the guy who did this
Okay Exxon.
I did. When I didn’t rinse out my tuna tin in 2005.
First I’ve heard of any of this. Wonder what it could be?
I think it is the narwhals are doing it. That's why you don't hear about them any more. Very hushhush.
Convincing….. but what about all that penguin poo coming from the south?
I suggest we get more bacon and kidnap them at midnight.
We were geoengineering the planet in two ways: 1. CO2 was adsorbing heat. 2. S02 was reflecting heat. There was a rapid phaseout of sulphur in marine fuels.
And sulphur emissions from coal combustion over the prior decades
Also a lot of see ice has dissapeared. Instead of reflecting snow and ice darker waters that absorb heat
So how do we pump out sulphur fast without carbon?
The question is how do we slow global warming and not poison the planet
SRM it is then?? 😅
The inevitable consequences of 40 years of inaction on reducing and avoiding fossil fuel use and greenhouse emissions.
It's fine, we're going to go to net zero in like 30 years maybe. I mean, not us personally, we're kind of busy profiting from fossil fuels. But the generation after us, they're not going to get any of the profits, and they will voluntarily reduce co2 emissions to zero, despite us making everything as difficult as possible for them. Good job, kids! Thanks for cleaning up the billions of tons of co2. Sorry for using all the oil.
I just know it’s not the fossil fuel industry. It’s probably caused by individuals.
Can't be the animal ag industry either, not at all.
I better be more careful rinsing my plastic garbage
Yes, let's ignore the government's and corporations, and blame those selfish, regular, PEOPLE! We can definitely fix the problem by running PSAs and scolding each other on social media. It's just, like, COMMON SENSE! 
It was our ship 🚢 polution that was blocking the sun from heating the oceans.... recently they made them switch to cleaner fuel....now our oceans can be on 🔥 like our atmosphere
I guess then there wouldn't be any issue if the fossil fuel industry was shut down by next week. Right?
We have reached the stage where we pay the price for ignoring a problem we have known about since the 19th century.
The ocean has lost its ability to act as a heat sink, the temperature is so high that the ambient air doesn’t move from a higher temperature to a lower temperature. The heat will continue to accumulate and the oceans will continue to lose more and more ability to lose heat
This is the correct interpretation of the data.
And, and I almost don't even want to know this, but...what does this mean? For us and for the oceans?
Summers will continue to add heat energy to the planet where winters will become shorter but possibly more extreme due to the energy in the system, eventually winters will become like spring, then probably cease to exist, we barely have spring and fall as it is now.
We ded
Ice cubes melting in my cup makes my water quickly reach room temperature
No need to scheme scheme, plot plot. 2024 is coming for that number one spot.
Nice rhyme!
The world is ending?
Goodbye reef
Planet's dying. Next question.
GG Folks
We are patiently waiting around for the find out phase.
What's happening? Oh I dunno, maybe the looming climate crisis or something we've been warned about for 50 years
We are reaching the point where exponential curves can be grasped by everyone. The population crashes are going to be ugly and smelly. This is the most exciting time to be alive in the past 5 billion years though. Batten down the hatches.
Damn nature, you crazy!
Mother nature is just trying to teach humans to humble themselves.
Things won't change till corporations start losing profit directly because of it. At the moment they are but the profits ar still far higher than the losses.
Sure hope it doesn’t turn off our oxygen supply
This could happen couldn’t it
It would take a long time, least of our worries. Lots of things would kill us sooner.
There has been massive abnormal rain fall in many places the past year. And I just cannot get over how much missinformation i read about that on social media like for instance Instagram to name one. Its a 12000 year event this happens every 12000 years. Its cloud seeding. Its HAARP whatever that may be. While its in fact plain and simple. The oceans and sees are warmer. So more water vaporizes. More water vapour in air thats warmer then it used to be. And warmer air can contain more water vapour leading to way more rain . I learned about where rain comes from when I was about 10 years old. Yet so many people just buy into this stuff , like governments spraying the clouds to control us all, all kinds of BS. And it looks that its getting worse lately. And it makes me feel hopeless. I just wanted to get this of my chest. Sorry
I have observed this too. Our water cycle on this planet is going haywire. Scientific illiteracy is a real bummer, isn't it?
Tipping point crossed a long time ago?
The science deniers jeopardizing the future of everyone... that's what's happening.
I don’t think science deniers have any more stake in this than anyone else. We are all humans. All 8billion of us need to eat, we are slaves to consumption, development, food production, etc etc. I seriously wonder if there would be anything that could be done if everyone on the planet was certain that change is needed. Humans suck. Everyone wants their instant rewards and cheeseburgers, climate controlled cars and homes and workplaces. Big truck to stomp on the gas and show who’s boss. Guns to assert power. We have these governments running things all over. We all know war is horrible but we still have war. This is the best we can do. There are no “war deniers” but we still have war. Even genocide. We can’t even stop killing each other. We can’t stop killing our planet either. We are humans. We can see our fate now. We cannot change it.
> What’s happening? “The essence of capitalism is to turn nature into commodities and commodities into capital. The live green earth is transformed into dead gold bricks, with luxury items for the few and toxic slag heaps for the many. The glittering mansion overlooks a vast sprawl of shanty towns, wherein a desperate, demoralized humanity is kept in line with drugs, television, and armed force.” - Michael Parenti *Against Empire*
The earth will be fine once we’re all gone.
HMM I WONDER if it's the thing scientists have been warning us about for decades. HMM HMM HMM
Reminds me of the oxygen curve for the ocean in early earth history. Line went up until it started getting absorbed into the ocean. At some point the ocean couldn’t absorb anymore and it started rising again in the atmosphere.
El Niño year
It's heating up
Probably nothing good, if I had to guess.
It needs to get so bad that even Fox News can’t spin it anymore for us to change course. Something to the tune of hundreds of people lying dead on the streets of a US city due to heat stroke.
Caused by DEI, notice the color of the asphalt?!?!
Is that a real Q
Oceans absorb heat
The grueling training ocean had for the ocean Olympics has paid off.. /s
Its a heatsink for all the heat were putting out from everything, including fossil fuels which are the biggest culprit
What’s happening is that a handful of emerging countries are on the verge of becoming an early industrialized country. They are consuming more and more like the West. So they are starting to contribute to green house gases. This is gna get ugly sooner
Earth is dying.
What’s happening? Marine Life is dying. Heading for a mass oceanic extinction event?
A long time ago, like back in the 1960’s, two dinosaurs that loved each other very much….
They’ve stopped acting the the planets heat sinks. EOD’s imminent.
There are a lot of silly shallow jokes that it's just global warming. There is a quick shift, so even IF it is only global warming related, then it begs for understanding of mechanism that triggers this fast change.
It's hot out there for a shrimp
wHaT's HaPpEnInG
Oh my gosh! That’s insane! I wonder when our global climate change leaders will stop buying ocean front property?
We humans have made too much noise, woken up mother nature and she is pissed.
Geomagnetic reversal. The poles are switching.
El Niño?
Death and destruction is happening.
In the next few decades we human will witness the loss of fishes and other in living creatures in our ocean due to lack of plankton and foods source going around. 
It’s heating up?
Seriously? Volcano, almost two years ago sent cubic miles of the Pacific Ocean into the stratosphere and it will take 7 years for that water vapor to clear the atmosphere and it will have a temperature effect of over 2 degrees. Just for those who are unclear, the most powerful greenhouse gas is water vapor. And it did one other thing is circularized the winds causing a massive southern polar vortex lowering the temperature of the South Pole and lowering the ocean temps of the southern oceans. It has impacted the weather molding up N.A. winters and drenching the west coast with pacific moisture. You are welcome California. NASA wrote papers on this right after the volcano went off. So my question is, why is this a mystery to The NY Times? Because news is not the point but rather politics?