Climate models can’t explain 2023’s huge heat anomaly — we could be in uncharted territory

boem@lemmy.world to World News@lemmy.world – 254 points –
Climate models can’t explain 2023’s huge heat anomaly — we could be in uncharted territory
nature.com
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Weather you like it or not, we have a mountain of hard choices in front of us. And nobody seems willing to climate.

It's probably the methane leaking from the poles that everyone has been saying will cause unexpected bullshit for decades

Look we can't start blaming individual countries - even if Poland has unusually gassy citizens, I just don't think they are a large enough population to make that kind of difference.

I don't know.. I had Polish pea soup once and I farted basically all night long. Imagine an entire nation doing that, every night. We might be on to something here.

Poland has unusually gassy citizens

Poor choice of words

I remember this article because I saw vlog brothers episode about it.

https://www.science.org/content/article/changing-clouds-unforeseen-test-geoengineering-fueling-record-ocean-warmth

Tldr they changed the fuel for boats to be cleaner resulting in less cloud cover significantly allowing the oceans to heat up faster than ever before.

Already taken into account, as well as other phenomena such as El Ninjo. Even if you add up the worst case scenarios for all known mechanisms the measured numbers are above that, there's a gap in the models and it's not in our favour.

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I watched a video on Youtube (so take it with a grain of salt) that claimed that the current climate models don't take into account the reflectivity of the clouds. When these are included, the models appear to be far more accurate. (I only have a passing interest in the topic, no expertise, so I likely misrepresented the conclusions. If you are interested more watch the video yourself.)

Here is an alternative Piped link(s):

video

Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.

I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.

Maybe the molten core is boiling and slowly rising to the surface, resulting in increase of temperature.

It's not because of the below, but that's a neat B-movie plot along the same lines as The Core.

The earth generally has an overall fixed rate at which it can radiate heat into space.

We dig up millions of years of stored solar energy and release it as heat.

I really don't understand why people are surprised. Sure, it can get really complicated as you factor in varying cloud cover, solar output, greenhouse effect.

But long-term trend, it shouldn't surprise anyone that every joule of energy we pull out of stored carbon, or even mass->energy via nuclear. We are generating more heat now than the earth is used to radiating out.

So obviously the average temperature is going to increase.

Even if we find ways to store the energy back, it takes energy to do so, and therefore more waste heat in the end.

If we want to cool the planet, we have to increase the rate that we radiate heat out into space.

Waste heat will eventually be a problem, but we're far from the limit yet:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41567-022-01652-6.epdf?sharing_token=yNwL92oPzcpklZSqVsr-ndRgN0jAjWel9jnR3ZoTv0N0u2htmeT1Hou6SrdtT_vjhsjDi8mPyrY6gILuO1cIPYM5r9vTrCV6dFSGWkHiq63t24rvELuWNN1w82farMIezAYiWj7ialZ8KkzI_SEgHP98WBPRE6PFu8lx9H4EP5A%3D

At present, the waste heat term is about four orders of magnitude smaller than the solar term. But at a growth factor of ten per century, they would reach parity in roughly 400 years. Indeed, the surface temperature of Earth would reach the boiling point of water (373 K) in just over 400 years under this relentless prescription. Clearly, extrapolating our recent — seemingly modest — 2.3% annual energy growth very far into the future quickly becomes ridiculous, and cannot happen.

This is not intended to suggest that waste heat is a bigger problem than, say, climate change from carbon dioxide emissions.

So that's something we're going to need to think about after getting greenhouse gas emissions under control.

If we want to cool the planet, we have to increase the rate that we radiate heat out into space.

Or generate less heat. Al La use less energy. As in downsize our oversized lifestyles. As in spend less money. As in go counter to capitalism.

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When a year or month is not as warm we always say "you can't judge on a single outlier, the average is upwards" Maybe 2023 will not turn out to be an outlier and it needs to be examined of course (and I know people are) but there's also no need to immediately go to "we're in uncharted waters." Not to mention weaselly headlines like "we could be.." immediately make me lose all confidence in the author.

Media sensationalism is part of the problem even when we think they're agreeing with us.

It's the scientific community giving an exasperated "we're fucked", my guy.

It's all outliers and constant "once a century" weather events these days.

Yup. These are expert scientists with their hands up in the air explaining how this shit is exponentially hitting the fan.

This is an inflection point. The fire alarms are blaring.

They should get every penny of funding available to deal with this.

It's not just about funding the scientists; it's about defunding the pollution (e.g. quit massively subsidizing roads and parking).

Yeah. It's only been...almost every month for the past several years has been the hottest on record ever. Definitely just a fluke,

It's AI, cloud storage, and cellular internet. That's a whole lot of microwave radiation and straight thermal radiation that didn't exist ten years ago, and it's growing fast. The additional heat build-up from our tech is outstripping our ability to compensate for it.

Waste heat is a minor cause in global warming. Greenhouse gas emissions predominate, and it's not close.

Radiation from communication infrastructure is hardly waste heat.

If a system's purpose isn't to produce heat, any heat it produces is waste heat.

It's whole purpose is to radiate specific radio waves...

Yes, and it's not infrared.

Do you think the purpose of telecom systems is to produce heat? What the hell do you think waste heat even is?

Waste heat is heat that is produced by a machine, or other process that uses energy, as a byproduct of doing work.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste_heat

Yes of course they proceduce waste heat as well. I was referring to the microwave part in the root comment...

Ahh right I see, I got very confused by the way you worded the comment but that may well have been a problem here on the receiving end

Please stop spreading misinformation. You're on the internet. Kindly fact check yourself in the future. It's better for everyone, including you!

But fact checking utilizes CPU cycles and thus heats up the planet!