From EGU
1.5 C vs 2 C global warming: New study shows why half a degree matters
European researchers have found substantially different climate change impacts for a global warming of 1.5°C and 2°C by 2100, the two temperature limits included in the Paris climate agreement. The additional 0.5°C would mean a 10-cm-higher global sea-level rise by 2100, longer heat waves, and would result in virtually all tropical coral reefs being at risk. The research is published today (21 April) inEarth System Dynamics, an open access journal of the European Geosciences Union, and is presented at the EGU General Assembly.
“We found significant differences for all the impacts we considered,” says the study’s lead author Carl Schleussner, a scientific advisor at Climate Analytics in Germany. “We analysed the climate models used in the [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)] Fifth Assessment Report, focusing on the projected impacts at 1.5°C and 2°C warming at the regional level. We considered 11 different indicators including extreme weather events, water availability, crop yields, coral reef degradation and sea-level rise.”
The team, with researchers from Germany, Switzerland, Austria and the Netherlands, identified a number of hotspots around the globe where projected climate impacts at 2°C are significantly more severe than at 1.5°C. One of these is the Mediterranean region, which is already suffering from climate change-induced drying. With a global temperature increase of 1.5°C, the availability of fresh water in the region would be about 10% lower than in the late 20th century. In a 2°C world, the researchers project this reduction to double to about 20%.
In tropical regions, the half-a-degree difference in global temperature could have detrimental consequences for crop yields, particularly in Central America and West Africa. On average, local tropical maize and wheat yields would reduce twice as much at 2°C compared to a 1.5°C temperature increase.
Tropical regions would bear the brunt of the impacts of an additional 0.5°C of global warming by the end of the century, with warm spells lasting up to 50% longer in a 2°C world than at 1.5°C. “For heat-related extremes, the additional 0.5°C increase marks the difference between events at the upper limit of present-day natural variability and a new climate regime, particularly in tropical regions,” explains Schleussner.
The additional warming would also affect tropical coral reefs. Limiting warming to 1.5°C would provide a window of opportunity for some tropical coral reefs to adapt to climate change. In contrast, a 2°C temperature increase by 2100 would put virtually all of these ecosystems at risk of severe degradation due to coral bleaching.
On a global scale, the researchers anticipate sea level to rise about 50 cm by 2100 in a 2°C warmer world, 10 cm more than for 1.5°C warming. “Sea level rise will slow down during the 21st century only under a 1.5°C scenario,” explains Schleussner.
Co-author Jacob Schewe, of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany, says: “Some researchers have argued that there is little difference in climate change impacts between 1.5°C and 2°C. Indeed, it is necessary to account for natural variability, model uncertainties, and other factors that can obscure the picture. We did that in our study, and by focusing on key indicators at the regional level, we clearly show that there are significant differences in impacts between 1.5°C and 2°C.”
William Hare, a senior scientist and CEO at Climate Analytics who also took part in the Earth System Dynamics research, adds: “Our study shows that tropical regions – mostly developing countries that are already highly vulnerable to climate change – face the biggest rise in impacts between 1.5°C and 2°C.”
“Our results add to a growing body of evidence showing that climate risks occur at lower levels than previously thought. It provides scientific evidence to support the call by vulnerable countries, such as the Least Developed Countries and Small Island Developing States, that a 1.5°C warming limit would substantially reduce the impacts of climate change,” says Hare.
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“Our results add to a growing body of evidence…”
Oh, is that what they call it? I guess cows and horses aren’t the only ones then.
It’s really amazing to me how a coupled, non-linear chaotic system that cannot be modeled is not only modeled, but the non-modelable system model is subdivided into small sections of the earth’s surface and fractions of a degree. It’s akin to trying to measure the size of a molecule with a yardstick.
And then they refer to the model out put as scientific evidence.
Yet another flaw in the models is touted as a scientific ‘discovery’.
Here in upstate NY near Canada, we had exactly ONE really warm day this month, yesterday. I fixed roofs all day long. NOAA predicted this month would be one of the warmest ever for my region. Super duper warm.
Even though you feel the cold, the NOAA anomaly will tell you your skin is lying
Just looked out the window and am amazed that one of my maple trees has tiny buds on it now! The entire forest was stark naked for nearly the entire month.
In Helsinki Spring is sluggish and barely opening its eyes, given Finland is prone to get heat from Asia as well as our recent El Nino, this spring is remarkable in how mild it is, see what I did there 😀
One wonders, all the empirical data shows things are better and all the doom is projections of the future.
Funny old game 😀
The bottom line from this probably is the use of 1.5C as a criterion for transferring wealth to the have not nations. They desperately need to establish and increase the global climate fund to fulfill the UN mandate. If they continue to use temperature as the primary metric for assessment of impacts, they will have have to go back to global warming as the moniker for the movement.
These people are not scientists. I’m not sure what they are, but they are not scientists.
Mercenary grant chasers.
Of course, if they had concluded that the difference of impact between 1.5 and 2 degC would be minimal or insignificant, the paper would not have been published.
Interesting that their models predict dread effects from warming that finally exceeds the error band in measurement. Being very generous, perhaps global temperature can be measured to whole degrees C, but the greens have not even proven that assertion.
Who knew that there was a difference between 1.5C and 2.0C. These scientist guys are masterful.
And then in a stroke of pure brilliance, the applied poorly substantiated assumptions of the effects of the .5C difference just recently discovered. And it all must be true because the computer thingies they use said so.
They projected the impact of their projected temperature increases.
It’s turtles all the way down.
“It’s turtles all the way down.”
Oh man that made me laugh my a$$ off
I’m still laughing!
“Splitting degrees”? I prefer by far to split infinities.
What if we split a banana?
Sometimes, with this current mob of greenheads, I’d like to split an atom.
Unbelievable crap. I had to say it. Now I feel better. Thanks.
The good about not selling corn to privates – since then beer stems from controlled breweries, SOP “Reinheitsgebot”.
Interesting news: greens searched and found Glyphosat. Now yelling about 1/1000 of health threshold.
Until high medieval time citizens bought corn, wheat at the marketplace from the local farmers. At the house holds wheat was grinded to flour.
Since then farmers were forbidden selling wheat to private persons – wheat has to be brought to windmills and the price for flour inherited a share for the local government.
The same here – don’t think for yourself, buy at the internext experts.
afonzarelli on April 22, 2016 at 7:27 am
I’ve just read all 62 comments here and not a one is from an agw “believer”! You really know that a posting is indefensable when there’s nobody here to defend it…
Afonz don’t you think believers shy to post without argument, without clue?
Johann, that’s to my point! (this one is SO bad that they’re not even trying…)
I’ve just read all 62 comments here and not a one is from an agw “believer”! You really know that a posting is indefensable when there’s nobody here to defend it…
In Richard Lindzen’s new video, he points to an observed increase of 1C in the last 2 centuries.
https://rclutz.wordpress.com/2016/04/21/the-climate-fuss/
This is one of the presumptions that has allowed the anti-human climate narrative to metastasize – the idea that any effect at all is, by definition, destructive. Sort of a half-a$$ed extrapolation of the butterfly effect, crossbred through popular media – instead of ‘we can’t predict or control complex systems because of the effects of small factors’ to ‘we cannot ALLOW small factors to exist or we will destroy the system.’ Thus, by this logic, any effect at all is potentially (even likely) catastrophic.
All with the abiding philosophy that humans are some kind of unnatural phenomenon and not part of nature – even our cities – as any other part of the biosphere. It’s not insignificant that one of the groups pushing this the hardest is Hollywood – quietly governed by a pseudo religion that suggests we were planted by aliens – and by extension have no claim to this planet at all. And even on the more ‘rational’ front, we have the high-brow academics who routinely refer to humans as a ‘pestilence’ or a ‘plague’ and speculate from the safety of their modern homes and campuses that we need to cull down the human population by ninety-percent or so – or can’t shower, or eat the wrong foods, or drive, or heat our homes, or wash our cars in our own @ur momisugly#$#% driveways.
Sorry, for the crankiness, but I woke up in Oregon on Earth Day, waiting for the Paris Climate deal to be signed, and I’m losing hope fast.
The world cannot be allowed to warm./s
These institutions and the government have previous for creating bogus science to serve a purpose.
Lie detectors, bite analysis and hair analysis were and are all pseudo sciences that were invented to convict people the FBI was sure was guilty but had insufficient evidence to prosecute.
Science gladly provided this nonsense for the FBI no questions asked.
I don’t see AGW science as any different in that respect
Lie detectors aren’t used in courts.
Do you have any evidence that bite analysis and hair analysis are invalid?
It’s no different than science telling the jury that the suspect is such and such a height with a particular blood type.
well let me see Marko, there was the guy who was given a few decades in prison based on expert hair analysis, and it was a dog hair, sorry mate, until recent decades you could not tell a dog hair from a human hair,
Here, I searched and the first link lol
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/crime/fbi-overstated-forensic-hair-matches-in-nearly-all-criminal-trials-for-decades/2015/04/18/39c8d8c6-e515-11e4-b510-962fcfabc310_story.html
but no flaw, it was pseudo science portrayed as valid science, overstated? giving someone 30 years for violen rape based on a dog hair you found… yeah right
Bite mark analysis is pseudo science, if you are interested in that you should look into it. It is nonsense.
Then ask yourself how many people have been exonerated with bite mark analysis? Probably none, only convictions.
Bitemarks
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/06/16/bite-marks-court/2428511/
and you can defeat a lie detector by lightly flexing your bunghole throughout the entire test its said.
Was that the only piece of evidence, or was it just one among many?
If the witness lied about the conclusiveness of the evidence, that’s on him, not the science.
It’s also on the defense attorney for not attacking the science. He knew they were going to introduce hair evidence.
As to how many are exonerated, you will never know, because those are ruled out before going to trial.
Just as if the blood evidence shows that the suspect is Type A, then anyone who doesn’t have Type A blood is dropped from the suspect list.
From the article:
“the additional 0.5°C increase marks the difference between events at the upper limit of present-day natural variability and a new climate regime, particularly in tropical regions,” explains Schleussner.”
I wonder if he considers the extreme weather of the 1930’s to be within the bounds of natural variability?
Some papers online go back to the late 1700s and there are Royal navy records in the UK that also have a lot of stuff relevant.
The river Tyne rose 12 feet, imagine if that happened today.. or if the Hurricane new York seen in the 1800s that wiped out an island, if that happened today.. there would be absolute hysteria.
As is people are literally looking at their thermometers and actually believing they are warmer than they should be!
I’ve spent a bit of time going through old news reports, and granted there may be some exaggeration to some extent, there are many detailed descriptions of the effects of flooding and storms, ice recession and islands being battered to hell.
One of the best and most easy to debunk is the example of revisionist history on Kiribati, who on their own government website say erosion has been an issue when the recording started in the early 1900s yet somehow this has been revised to “caused by the CO2 warming that took effect in 1970 according to the IPCC”.
No doubt the immediate scientifically unsupported response to this is “climate change is making the change faster” and of course you then ask “well then how much is human change and how much is natural?” and you never get a satisfying answer.
“well then how much is human change and how much is natural?”
In my experience, most people’s idea of an explanation consists only of a label. What cause effect A? Simply B. Very few actually take the next step of assessing if B is in fact true or what else B would imply. As soon as the mind attaches a pleasant label, the thinking stops. Makes me wonder what the trillions we spend on education actually accomplishes. Makes the heart weep.
Dave education in it’s current format is Neducation.
http://d36xcvrkegf0f1.cloudfront.net/images/worlds/2756/NedRules.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/LEmub.jpg
and if you should stray..
Education is conditioning plain and simple, and 1 in 4 boys who are not behaving like good little robots by 5 years old are drugged. You must conform.
Most of all higher education teaches most people what they can and cant say as much as the subject material to prepare them for a world of ignoring the elephant in the room.
Let’s draw a surface temperature chart of the United States. Start with the decade of the 1930’s being the hottest decade of any subsequent year. Second, take the 1998, high temperature as being the hottest since the 1930’s, including every year in the 21st century with the exception of one month in the year 2016.
How high above the 1998, high temperature, should we set the temperature of the highpoint of the 1930’s (we can’t go by NASA/NOAA figures)? Well, we know that the 1930’s had the most extreme weather in modern history, with a decade-long heatwave covering the entire United States and Canada. It was so bad, that there were calls to evacuate the central parts of the United States because of the extreme heat and drought. The extreme weather then, is why a lot of current day Californians have grandparents who came from Oklahoma. 🙂
The kind of extreme weather we saw in the 1930’s is exactly the type of extreme weather that the Climate Alarmists are predicting will happen if our current-day temperatures increase by 2 degrees, so I think we should create the chart showing the highpoint of the 1930’s as being at least 2 degrees hotter than the 1998, high.
Next we draw a trendline that passes through the 1930’s highpoint and through the 1998, highpoint. Notice, we have a “longterm” downtrend. Extending the trendline past the 1998, highpoint, we see that the downtrend line was broken early in the year 2016, and has currently dropped down to about even with the downtrend line in subsequent months. (And El Nino is going away.)
So, we appear to be at a turning point of one kind or another, whether you go by the old, reliable charts, or the new doctored ones. Of course, if the temperatures start to increase from here, then we have to acknowledge the reality of that aspect, but that would not necessarily mean the rise was caused by humans, although the Alarminst would be off and running. There was no human influence on the climate of the 1930’s, so even if we were to get that hot, it would not necessarily mean it had anything to do with human activity.
Up or down, that is the question for the moment.
What is ironic is the Alarmists could have made practically their same argument without butchering the surface temperature data. They would just have had to start their shorterm CO2 temperature curve increase in the 1970’s instead of the 1930’s, and then keep claiming it was going to continue going up forever, as long as we continued to pump CO2 into the atmosphere.
Does this make all disputes over surface temperature maps irrelevant? I, personally, would never be satisfied until the Alarmist admitted they had doctored the data, but we have arrived at the same place, either way you look at it: either the temperatures push above the Alarmists 1998, “hottest year ever” benchmark, and keep going up, and the temperatures push above the 1930-1998 downtrend line and change things into an uptrend. Or, the temperatures could also get colder and continue the “longterm” downtrend line, and break the Alarmists “uptrend” line and turn it into a downtrend.
Of course, the real question to ask is, does CO2 have anything to do with any of this? The current answer is we don’t know.
Well, I happen to have just attended the EGU General Assembly and I can tell you all that this press release came and went without fanfare for us participants, as far as I can tell. There is a lot of good science in the thousands of presentations. But, rather too much of it is laced with GW as the accepted climate trajectory or, as AGW, the justification for the research. One of the more bizarre posters I saw in this vein simulated lightning strikes on a wet sandstone surface using a copper cathode tip to produce a small pit in the melted rock, and the authors calculated the resulting crater equates to a maximum erosive equivalent of 1.8 µm/yr. This was claimed to be a significant because it “indicates that cloud-to-ground lightning play[s] a non-negligible role in the global erosion system” as lightning strikes increase in number due to GW. None of the authors was at their poster to defend this. Another oral presentation was by an individual, not a stratigrapher but a geographer, concerned with defending and defining the Anthropocene. WUWT readers may remember that the term Anthropocene is suggested (but not yet formally proposed) to become part of the geological time scale. It was an interesting presentation but he repeatedly used the discredited hockey stick graph which deleted the Medieval Warm Period, Roman Warm Period and Marinoan Warm Period. The one or two questions at the end were basically by people wringing their hands at the devastation wrought by human beings, not about the definition of the base of the proposed chronostratigraphic unit or whether or not it is necessary or useful.
How long till the Roman and Medieval ports now far inland have water again?
Models have been fit to hindcast have they not? What do they say about sea level rise in 2016? I am betting we should all be wearing snorkels.
These people have missed their calling. They could do very well as fortune-tellers in a travelling road show
The finer you split it the greater your dread with each approaching split. Perfect. Pure theater, pure politics.
More Xbox science…
Boring.