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Global Temperature Set To Reach 1 Degree C Over Pre-Industrial Levels (metoffice.gov.uk)
Layzej writes: Based on data from January to September, the HadCRUT dataset shows 2015 global mean temperature at 1.02 degrees C (±0.11 degrees C) above pre-industrial levels for the first time. The Copenhagen Accord recognizes "the scientific view that the increase in global temperature should be below 2 degrees Celsius (PDF)." Physicist Ken Rice points out that the next degree Celsius may be closer than we think. "It's taken us about 160 years to warm by about 1 degree C. This is associated with emissions of about 550GtC (550 billion tonnes of carbon, or ~2000 billion tonnes of CO2). Current emissions are around 10GtC/year. If we continue emitting as we are, we will double our cumulative emissions in about 50 years. If we continue to increase our emissions, it will be even sooner.
How accurate were the thermometers they used in pre-indistrial times? Even now most temperature sensors are +/- 1 Degree C or worse. For a few quid you can get something that is accurate to +/- 0.2 degrees, provided you have it installed properly and it's only guaranteed that accuracy for the first few years after it's made (Sensirion sht75 for example)
While it is pithy and simple to set a target temperature goal, like 2C, i think it misses the overall implications of a changing climate. As the Nature article today on slashdot points out, even a mild temperature change could possibly do something like turn the entire Middle East extremely humid making it basically uninhabitable. Something this trivial, like a local increase in moisture over a relative small region, could provoke war, even nuclear war.
There could be a change in ocean currents, or moisture content/cloud cover of other regions, or any number of other effects from relatively small changes in temperature that in themselves aren't dangerous but human reactions to them could actually be a 'doomsday' level.
I'd like to think that I do. I went to school for Software Engineering, but I would say that I do like science. But science to me is usually about the hard, provable facts. I'm more inclined to trust the mathematics where things require indisputable logical proofs.
For example, do you have any reading on anything like the math behind how much CO2 we have released and any scientific experiments that show that that amount of CO2 should be expected to raise the temperature of the planet by 1C?
To me, science is about the experiments used to verify reality. All I ever hear is data like the globe is warmer, we have released all this CO2, but does it really add up correctly in practice? From what I have read, it seemed like we really don't know whether or not the increase in global temperature we see is really what we should have expected to see given our measurements. It seems like too much uncertainty yet for the topic of global warming because there is too much data that we don't know and too many variables that we can't accurately isolate the one we are testing.