An article at countercurrents.org said this recently:
«A new study has warned that if global temperatures rise more than 1.5°C, significant crop diversity could be lost in many regions»
—Global Warming and Food Security: The Impact on Crop Diversity
Are we not sufficiently at the 1.5°C mark that this dance in reporting is ludicrous?
I'm starting to perceive the weather/climate distinction less as a matter of scientific certainty and more as an excuse to delay action for a long time. Here that distinction seems to be actively working against the cause of human survival by delaying what seems a truly obvious conclusion, and in doing so giving cover to inaction.
We already have a many year trend that shows things getting pretty steadily worse year over year, with not much backsliding, so it's not like we realistically have to wait 10 years to see if this surpassing 1.5°C is going to magically go away on its own. Indeed, by the time we get that much confirmation, these effects we fear will have seriously clubbed us over the head for too long.
«“The top ten hottest years on record have happened in the last ten years, including 2024,”
António Guterres said in his New Year message, stressing that humanity has “no time to lose.”»
—2024, Hottest Year on Record, Marks ‘Decade of Deadly Heat’
I keep seeing reports (several quoted by me here below) that we averaged above that in 2024,
so I find this predication on a pipe dream highly misleading.
Even just wordings suggesting that the crossing of some discrete boundary will trigger an effect, but that not crossing it will not, is misleading. It's not like 1.49°C will leave us with no loss of diversity, but 1.51°C will hit us with all these effects.
What needs to be said more plainly is this:
Significant crop diversity is being ever more lost in real time now, and this loss is a result of global average temperatures that are dangerous and getting moreso. That they are a specific value on an instantaneous or rolling average basis gives credibility and texture to this qualitative claim, but no comfort should be drawn from almost-ness nor from theoretical clains that action could yet pull us back from a precipice that there is not similarly substantiated qualitative reason to believe we are politically poised to make.
Science reporting does this kind of thing a lot. Someone will get funding to test whether humans need air to breathe but some accident of how the experiments are set up will find that only pregnant women under 30 were available for testing so the report will be a very specific about that and news reports will end up saying "new report proves pregnant women under 30 need air to breathe", which doesn't really tell the public the thing that the study really meant to report. Climate reporting is full of similarly overly specific claims that allow the public to dismiss the significance of what's really going on. People writing scientific reports need to be conscious of the fact that the reporting will be done in that way and that public inaction will be a direct result of such narrow reporting.
In the three reports that I quote below, the Berkeley report at least takes the time to say "recent warming trends and the lack of adequate mitigation measures make it clear that the 1.5 °C goal will not be met." We need more plain wordings like this, and even this needs to have been more prominently placed.
There is a conspiracy, intentional or not, between the writers of reports and the writers of articles. The article writer wants to quote the report, but the report wants to say something that has such technical accuracy that it will be misleading when quoted by someone writing articles. Some may say it's not an active conspiracy, just a negative synergy, but the effect is the same. Each party acts as if it is being conservative and careful, but the foreseeable combination of the two parts is anything but conservative or careful.
References
(bold added here for emphasis)
«The global annual average for 2024 in our dataset is estimated as 1.62 ± 0.06 °C (2.91 ± 0.11 °F)
above the average during the period 1850 to 1900, which is traditionally used a reference
for the pre-industrial period.
[…]
A goal of keeping global warming to no more than 1.5 °C (2.7 °F) above pre-industrial
has been an intense focus of international attention.
This goal is defined based on multi-decadal averages,
and so a single year above 1.5 °C (2.7 °F) does not directly
constitute a failure. However,
recent warming trends
and the lack of adequate mitigation measures
make it clear that the 1.5 °C goal will not be met.
The long-term average of global temperature is likely to effectively
cross the 1.5 °C (2.7 °F) threshold in the next 5-10 years.
While the 1.5 °C goal will not be met,
urgent action is still needed to limit man-made climate change.»
—Global Temperature Report for 2024 (Berkeley Earth)
«The global average surface temperature was 1.55 °C (with a margin of uncertainty of ± 0.13 °C) above the 1850-1900 average, according to WMO’s consolidated analysis of the six datasets. This means that
we have likely just experienced the first calendar year with a global mean temperature of more than 1.5°C above the 1850-1900 average.»
—
WMO confirms 2024 as warmest year on record at about 1.55°C above pre-industrial level
«NASA scientists further estimate Earth in 2024 was about 2.65 degrees Fahrenheit (1.47 degrees Celsius) warmer than the mid-19th century average (1850-1900). For more than half of 2024, average temperatures were more than 1.5 degrees Celsius above the baseline, and the annual average, with mathematical uncertainties, may have exceeded the level for the first time.»
—
Temperatures Rising: NASA Confirms 2024 Warmest Year on Record
Author's Notes:
If you got value from this post, please “Share” it.
This grew out of an essay I posted at Mastodon, and a haiku (senryu) that I later wrote as a way to distill out some key points.
