Welcome to Overshot!
An analysis of historical daily temperature data from Climate Reanalyzer
shows that the IPCC's 1.5°C temperature increase limit has been reached (at least temporarily),
as the average temperature increase over the last 365 days has exceeded 1.5°C. Since 2023 was the start of a major En Nino event,
it is likely that average annual temperature increase will exceed 1.4°C every year this decade.
We need to take climate cooling seriously. There may be unintended consequences, but NOT doing any cooling could easily result in worse consequences. Many climate scientists believe the following:
• Net Zero won't be achieved in time to avoid disaster.
• Without cooling, cascading tipping points will occur in the next decade or so.
• Sunlight reflection methods (SRM) provide powerful cooling.
• SRM could buy the time needed for Net Zero to be achieved.
Years ago we assumed that 2°C would be “acceptable”, but that was based on a flawed economic model. Many climate scientists now think that even
a 1.5°C temperature increase is not acceptable.
Here are some of the things that we have to worry about as the temperature increase heads toward 2.0°C:
| “Item” at Risk | Notes |
| Coral reefs | |
| Amazon rain forest | |
| Tropical rain forests | |
| Boreal forests | Boreal forests have already declined by XX% and will likely decline an additional YY% by 2050 no matter what action is taken to limit the temperature increase. |
| AMOC flow | |
| Arctic Sea ice | |
| Permafrost (CO2 and CH4) | |
| Methane Hydrates | |
| Ocean acidification (decrease in pH) | |
| Sea level rise | |
| Extent and thickness of terrestrial ice-sheets. | |
| Human mortality attributed (directly or indirectly) to climate change or extreme weather events. | |
| Ecosystems collapse | Many species are “tuned” to live within narrow ranges of both temperature and precipitation. As the climate changes many of these will not be able to adapt quickly enough and may mostly die out (e.g., coral reefs) |
Climate scientists have not done a good job of categorizing these risks (i.e., how saying how bad they will be for various temperature scenarios), other than to say that many will get worse the longer the temperature increase stays above about 1.5°C, as it will likely do for at least the next 10-15 years. Since (1) we are at about 1.5°C, (2) emissions are still going up and will likely do so for the next 10-15 years, and (3) the cost of removing CO2 from the atmosphere will be too high for the foreseeable future to allow significant removals, the only way to keep those risks “in check” is to pro-actively cool the planet to buy time for the cost of removing CO2 from the atmosphere to decline enough so that our society will be willing to actually pay for significant removals.
Just look at what happenned in Los Angeles in early February. Can we really allow the temperature to get much above current levels? In addition, many climate scientists (e.g., James Hansen) advocate for working to reduce the global average temperature to less than 1.0°C.
Recent articles that might be of interest:
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