Bang!
We do indeed live in interesting times.
For years, nay decades they have been wittering on about this magic 1.5 degrees of warble gloaming. I don’t know what’s so important about 1.5 [why not 1.4 or 1.6?] but this is apparently a magic number. Again they don’t seem to know what is going to happen if this 1.5 is reached. Will the planet explode? Will all volcanoes, even the dormant and extinct ones suddenly erupt? Will earthquakes rip the planet asunder? The way they have been going on about it, it must be something spectacular.
So we’re going to reach it. My guess is that nothing will happen. Okay some places are going to get long heatwaves and others are going to get a lot of rain but that is happening anyway.
What happens when we reach 1.5? Will they finally shut the fuck up about warble gloaming because nothing happens? Will they invent another new number and start screaming about 2 degrees? That would be my bet. After all they have to have a panic event to worry us all into paying ever more “carbon taxes” and to keep themselves in a job.
But passing the level in one of the next few years would not mean that the Paris limit had been broken. Scientists say there is still time to restrict global warming by cutting emissions sharply.
Ah, so they thought of this one. If we pass the limit we have to redouble our efforts to stop passing it again.
One thing that has frequently puzzled me is their obsession with “the second half of the 19th Century”. Why not the 18th? Century? Or the 15th? Or any other century? The simple answer I suspect is that they haven’t of course got the numbers, and if they did it would show that there is nothing extraordinary going on at all, just the planet doing its thing as it always has done.
Just as an aside to all this, I read an article which was highlighted by Mac If you haven’t already, then read it..
The Real Science Behind Global Warming
It makes for a very interesting read if not food for thought?
The parable of the mote and the beam comes to mind.
You trying to keep warm is terrible. But them jetting about between multiple homes is a sacrifice they are willing to make.
Meanwhile over to the East there are a few country’s with whole forests of timber stuck in their eyes.
China, India and Vietnam are having none of this nonsense and are greatly increasing their already huge coal fired power generation.
Maybe the virtuous West have devised a force field to keep those evil Eastern Carbon Dioxide molecules from drifting over here and cooking us.
We are doomed, Ah tell ye. Doo-oomed.
There no Global Temperature.
I know they all talk about global temperature and stopping it rising by 1.5oC or whatever, but there actually is no such thing.
Why? Because temperature is an “intrinsic” property of matter, as opposed to “extrinsic”: you can take a series of temperatures of different samples of matter and calculate the average, but that average (oC, oF, Kelvin or Rankine) has no meaning, except as a kind of hand-waving proxy for heat (Joules).
Take a silly example: What is the temperature of a glass of gin & tonic? If I tell you that it was made from gin at 20 oC, tonic and lemon both at 5 oC and a lump of ice at-15 oC, what is the temperature of the whole? The “average” is 3.75 oC but the true answer is we don’t know. We don’t have the masses of each element, nor the specific heat capacities, nor the latent heat, nor any knowledge of the environment.
Now try this with a planet composed of many different materials, with different specific heat capacities, water in three phases, gasses at varying pressures, one side sunny, the other dark, rotating, heating, cooling all at the same time… It has no “temperature” in any meaningful sense.
And if it has no temperature, it is meaningless to discuss a future 1.5oC warming because that won’t exist either.
The whole Global Doominess is underpinned by an unspoken assumption of temperature that just isn’t true. But they carry on regardless; nobody likes a show stopper because the show, and the money, might stop
PS: as well as the article you link, hop over to wattsupwiththat.com / joannenova.com.au / notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com / thegwpf.org etc. for more info. wmbriggs.com is also good, particularly on the brokenness of science and “experts”.
The BBC committed some (unintended) humour with their report on this yesterday morning. Some ‘expert’ was quoted as saying that temperatures would rise past the 1.5 degree level, but would probably drop below it again at times. What kind of a tipping point is that????
More on the reporting from The Daily Sceptic:
https://dailysceptic.org/2023/05/19/1-5c-temperature-disaster-story-makes-its-annual-media-appearance/