You have to wonder what policy preferences we're supposed to glean from this mess of an
analysis from WaPo, a "newspaper" that probably needs to die in some kind of combination of light and darkness, both of which apparently could simultaneously contribute to disaster:
It is widely accepted that humans have been heating up the planet for over a century by burning coal, oil and gas. Earth has already warmed by almost 1.2 degrees Celsius (2.2 degrees Fahrenheit) since preindustrial times, and the planet is poised to race past the hoped-for limit of 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming.
But fewer people know that burning fossil fuels doesn’t just cause global warming — it also causes global cooling. It is one of the great ironies of climate change that air pollution, which has killed tens of millions, has also curbed some of the worst effects of a warming planet. Tiny particles from the combustion of coal, oil and gas can reflect sunlight and spur the formation of clouds, shading the planet from the sun’s rays. Since the 1980s, those particles have offset between 40 and 80 percent of the warming caused by greenhouse gases.
And now, as society cleans up pollution, that cooling effect is waning. New regulations have cut the amount of sulfur aerosols from global shipping traffic across the oceans; China, fighting its own air pollution problem, has slashed sulfur pollution dramatically in the last decade.
The result is even warmer temperatures — but exactly how much warmer is still under debate. The answer will have lasting impacts on humanity’s ability to meet its climate goals.
“We’re starting from an area of deep, deep uncertainty,” said Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist and research lead for the payments company Stripe. “It could be a full degree of cooling being masked.”
When you start from a "widely accepted premise" and reach a self-contradicting conclusion, it might be time to re-examine the areas of wide agreement. Besides being popular, do these ideas hold any water at all? And what do these writers think "irony" means?
4 comments:
Earth has already warmed by almost 1.2 degrees Celsius (2.2 degrees Fahrenheit) since preindustrial times
Nicely avoiding mention of the preindustrial Maunder Minimum.
Any story can be a saga, a comedy, a tragedy, etc- it just depends where the timeline is chosen. A graph can tell any story depending on what segment is chosen. Hence avoidance of the Maunder Minimum, the Viking age warming, etc-
It is all a total, complete scam designed to panic people and get them to act in a certain way that enhances the power of their "betters". Same as always.
It is going to kill a lot of people should the proposed solutions be enacted.
For most people on this planet, abundant energy is what keeps them alive.
Perhaps this is a rationale for the plans to pump particulates into the atmosphere.
Earth has already warmed by almost 1.2 degrees Celsius (2.2 degrees Fahrenheit) since preindustrial times
Nicely avoiding mention of the preindustrial Maunder Minimum.
Also avoiding the bland fact that 11k years after the end of the last ice sheet retreat, we're still a couple of degrees cooler than the geologic warming trend of our planet. Even Wikipedia acknowledges that we're presently in an interglacial period of the current Quaternary period.
Eric Hines
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