This is only tangential, but it pisses me off that denialists will point at any inaccuracy in the models, large or small, too smuggly say “see? This is all wrong! It’s a lie!”
But they have no model that can predict better weather trends without climate change.
We KNOW we’re driving straight off a cliff. Whether we’re already in the air or still have the back wheels on the ground is fairly irrelevant: the only possible way is down.
With this year, we have returned to “original prediction” territory. The original projections made by the gas company engineers who discovered that CO2 was a greenhouse gas in the first place and did the math, came up with predictions this year lines up with very well.
Which means that everything since has been a watered down lie, which we should all expect from all corporations in the first place at this point.
I’m far from a climate denialist so please don’t take my question that way, but is it possible it was just a freak occurance? And this year could be back to normal?
We’re entering a bit of uncharted territory when it comes to El Niño And La Niña (simplified explanation, El Niño hotter and La Niña colder). Normally they last about 9-12 months. We Just exited a triple dip La Niña (2020-2023), and the last one was 1998-2001, and before that 1973-1976. Now in the past this multi year La Niña followed a strong El Niño, and scientists had a few theories that mostly revolved around the planet cooling due to thermo differences across the surface. The issue with this recent La Niña is that it did not follow a strong El Niño, and the La Niña effect caused the jet stream to weaken significantly in 2023, it is very important for cooling different areas of the planet, weakening hurricanes, and many other things. Right now we’re in a neutral state and likely to shift over to an El Niño later this year. Meaning what we’ve seen as of late could be a good bit worse when El Niño occurs.
We are also in a time period where the solar cycle is peaking (most likely to peak in 2025). While we’re not exactly sure about the climate impacts of the solar activity, we do know it means more storms and magnetic waves hitting the Earth, and with global warming our atmosphere has expanded a bit and there could be more unexpected effects such as issues with GPS, aviation, and satellites…
All in all we’re not entirely certain as to why 2023 was that much hotter and there are many theories, , but based on history we could experience a significantly hotter 2024. Also, if the trend continues it could mean that’s 2023 was a freak year for us, but in the future it could become the norm.
I know this doesn’t really answer the question, but at the moment there is no finite answer. However, due to these irregularities occurring it does not look good down the road and we won’t know for certain until it happens.
Thanks for the detailed response. Everytime I learn more about this stuff it just gets more and more worrisome. I already know very little about how the climate works and now even the experts are a little unsure what’s going on. It doesn’t paint a great picture for the future.
It seems like some of what you said doesn’t check out with this chart, like there was a four year Nina in '98-'02, and were currently in a very strong Nino.
Not trying to be contradictory and like maybe this isn’t the best source, but can you give context on how what you said meshes with this?
So I grabbed my source from NOAA which is the US govt agency that covers atmospheric and ocean patterns. I’m on mobile so you’ll have to forgive the non imbeded link.
Air and sea temperatures, ice shelf thickness etc. going back to fit perfectly with the current models and 2023 going down as a “freak occurrence” is, at least in my opinion, highly unlikely.
But it’s also missing an important point: this is a scientific problem and realizing that we were not able to predict what could potentially happen in just a few years in the future, is worrisome in its own regard.
“Uncharted territory” basically means that scientists confirm it’s anybody’s guess what is going to happen next, since they don’t understand why it’s happening in the first place.
“It could imply that a warming planet is already fundamentally altering how the climate system operates, much sooner than scientists had anticipated.”
No matter how much we fuck it up, this rock will always be more liveable than anything we can realistically find elsewhere. This planet is our spaceship, we better start treating it like one.
I don’t know, there’s lots of things I would risk doing at home that I wouldn’t try on a spaceship. It’s also a metaphore that can hopefully speak to the kind of people who think a fresh planet would be the solution.
I mean, I understand the sentiment, but science doesn’t go around shouting EVERYTHING IS FUCKED without empirical evidence. Here’s Steffen et al., 2015:
Awhile back I saw, or created a memory of a short, high energy video of … a cartoon character(?) singing “We’re fucked! We’re fucked! We’re super fucking fucked!” In a high pitched voice over a bombastic orchestra. There was more to the song, but that’s all I clearly remember. (Or all that I’ve crafted in the form of my false memory of it.)
I tried to search it out, but, you know, search engines. They just want me to go to YouTube or song lyrics sites that aren’t what I’m looking for because bad algorithms drive engagement.
Anyway, that’s basically my soundtrack whenever I read climate or political news these days. (And the way capitalism has destroyed the internet, now that I think about it!)
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