Not looking for a political argument. I need facts. I am in no way a climate change denier, but I had a conversation with someone who told me the average increase is only 2°F over the past 100 years. That doesn’t seem like a lot and would support the argument that the climate goes through waves of changes naturally over time.
I’m going to run into him tomorrow and I need some ammo to support the climate change argument. Is it the rate of change that’s increasing that makes it dangerous? Is 2° enough to cause a lot of polar ice caps to melt? I need some facts to counter his. Thanks!
Edit: spelling
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It’s mostly about how rapidly it’s happening. Flora and fauna simply cannot evolve and adapt to these rapid changes. See humans are experts at adapting. We can survive the temps because of our tech, intelligence, etc. Not all humans will survive of course, along with the QOL being crappy post survival. The flora and fauna are very in danger. Another big thing is microorganisms tend to evolve at a very rapid rate, so they are benefiting from the rapid changes as well
Also it’s 2 degrees Celsius which is 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit (just in case you’re in the US). Tell him to think of it like a fever in the human body. In F terms, If avg human temp is 98.6, a temp of over 101 will wear you out real fast and it’s not sustainable. Ecosystems are sensitive just like bodies. And the idea of the 2 degrees flattens the line of extreme heat waves and extreme cold snaps indicative of climate change. The intensity of weather events isn’t clearly conveyed when we think – what does 2 degrees matter. It matters because if there are days or weeks when everything gets so hot that people plants and animals die- yikes. Same for the reverse. We could also say who cares if sea levels rise a couple of feet, but just ask the 5 million people it would displace. A little goes a long way in living systems.
A global 2° increase in average is indeed huge.
To give a sense of scale, a global 3° less was the ice age : A 2 km thick ice sheet on the landmass at latitude as south as New-York City
That’s the problem with averages, they don’t tell you what extremes were evened out. The average net worth of an adult in the US is over $700.000. But if you move towards the middle person by person, remove the richest and the poorest, remove the next richest and poorest until you get right to the person in the middle where half the population have more and half have less, that “median” net worth is $120.000
Warming up a whole planet by an average of 2°F is impressive enough, it’s pretty big after all. But it says nothing about how that works out locally. In some areas it can be colder some times of the year, in others a LOT warmer than it ever was. Siberia was 8°F warmer in 2020, and Taymyr island 14°F. It’s never been so hot there, ever. Black heats up more than white. Siberia neatly covered in snow reflects sunlight, but the soil beneath is dark. So nothing seems to happen for a while, but once the snow is melted, the ground heats up very quickly.
Those fast local changes affect the weather much more than the global climate as a whole. We get an almost normal average of rain per year here, just that it now comes down as torrential rainstorms with fast floods, and then nothing again for the next three months. That’s just not the same as calm rain over several days every month.
Just because it’s 2°F hotter large rivers shouldn’t simply evaporate. But the extremes added into this average got more extreme, which already causes a lot of damage. We don’t have to wait and see what the horror scenarios of 2050 might be like. People die already.
Temperatures tend to exist on gradients. That is to say they have a smooth-ish transition from hot to cold or vice versa. One consequence of that is you can draw lines on maps approximately where the average temperature is a key point (for example, the melting point of ice). For simplification we’ll use latitude lines. Looking at the northern hemisphere, pick a latitude line (it doesn’t really matter if you’re not 100% accurate) where it looks like everything north of it has ice year-round. Increasing the average temperature will shift this line north somewhat.
What will happen when we shift this line north? First, miles and miles of ice sheets will melt (not to mention that less new ice will form both north of that line and in places where it’s not cold enough year-round). The same thing will happen to mountains as well. So these places are less icy, what’s the big deal? Well ice doesn’t just vanish, it has to go somewhere. Most of it will melt into the oceans. This will cause the oceans to rise somewhat. Now we can draw some new lines. Draw every coastline, everywhere in the world, and then move it in a bit (to account for the new ocean level). Every city that was on a coast before and that your lines now overlap will flood (most coastal cities are very low-lying). Some places are very flat and the new shoreline will be many miles inland (Florida for example will be nearly entirely underwater by current predictions [https://coast.noaa.gov/digitalcoast/tools/slr.html](https://coast.noaa.gov/digitalcoast/tools/slr.html) if you want to see the map for yourself).
Remember how I said most of it will go into the ocean? What about the rest of it? Well some of it will end up in other waterways (rivers and lakes and so on) and some of it will end up in the air as water vapor. This might sound like a good thing, some of the consequences of hotter temperatures might be alleviated by more rain. There’s just one problem, the things that cause deserts to be deserts and rainforests to be rainforests don’t go away with climate change. This means that the planet’s extra rainfall will be concentrated in places that already get rain. This won’t be a huge deal for the rainforests, but in places that get intermittent rain there will be more and bigger storms. For the American Atlantic coast, the Carribean, the pacific coasts of east Asia and the Phillipenes this means more and bigger hurricanes (which gather moisture and heat from large swaths of the ocean so they are particularly effected by small temperature increases). For the American Midwest, more and stronger tornados.
All of this sounds pretty bad but maybe your friend doesn’t believe that we’re actually melting enough ice to matter. Let’s draw a line in the southern hemisphere now. You’ll notice that it’s mostly ocean, no ice to melt there until we get to Antarctica. Antarctica on the other hand has a lot of ice. More than you think. Antarctica is bigger than Europe, and covered in ice that averages over a mile in thickness ([https://www.nsf.gov/geo/opp/antarct/science/icesheet.jsp#:~:text=At%20its%20thickest%20point%20the,all%20the%20world’s%20fresh%20water](https://www.nsf.gov/geo/opp/antarct/science/icesheet.jsp#:~:text=At%20its%20thickest%20point%20the,all%20the%20world’s%20fresh%20water)). That’s 90% of the ice in the world. That means once your line starts crossing into Antarctica the effects on climate change will be literally 10x as fast as they were before Antarctic ice started melting. So when does that happen? it already has ([https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/150880/antarcticas-brunt-ice-shelf-finally-breaks](https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/150880/antarcticas-brunt-ice-shelf-finally-breaks)).
We aren’t scared of 2 degrees because it makes every day that much hotter. We’re scared because we moved the line onto Antarctica, and there’s going to be a LOT of extreme weather and flooding because of that.
Alternately, for a quicker approach, look at these two lovely graphs. The first is average temperature over the last 2000 years (you can see exactly where the industrial revolution starts). The second is average temperature over the last 800,000 years. See how the range on the second one is a difference of less than 20 degrees? The 2000 year maps shouldn’t have a scale that’s anything like the 800000 year map but it does and we are definitely still going up rather than leveling off.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:2000%2B_year_global_temperature_including_Medieval_Warm_Period_and_Little_Ice_Age_-_Ed_Hawkins.svg
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:EPICA_temperature_plot.svg
Short answer, there’s about a 5°F window that the earth sits in where the glaciers are pretty much stable. They aren’t sucking up all the water in the ocean and converting it to ice and they’re not drowning us by getting too hot and releasing all the water. There’s a lot of wild fluctuations but they all kinda average out.
It took near 2000 years for the planet to go from a 3 down to a 2, and for a while scientists were worried that we’d start to see the glaciers gradually sucking up the oceans. Then we discovered fossil fuels and in 100 years we went from a 2 to a 4. That’s why people are concerned, it’s the acceleration. Like miles per hour, you can measure the speed we’re changing in fahrenheit degrees per millenia(fpm).
We just went from -0.5 fpm to +20 fpm extraordinary quickly.
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