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Earth

2022 Was One of Earth's Hottest Years (msn.com) 135

Posted by EditorDavid from the climate-changing dept.
Planet earth "has now warmed at least 1.1 degrees Celsius (2 degrees Fahrenheit) compared with preindustrial levels," reports the Washington Post, "and nearly every year in the past decade ranks near the top."

"On Thursday, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration ranked 2022 as the sixth-hottest year on record and reported that the 10 warmest have all occurred since 2010...." Twenty-eight countries set national record-high annual averages last year, including Britain, Spain, France, Germany, China and New Zealand. Despite 2022 being slightly cooler than other recent years, Berkeley Earth reported that 850 million people experienced their warmest year ever. Humans' emissions of carbon dioxide and other planet-warming gases have driven this rapid warming, scientists say.

"This is a big change for the planet. And that activity has increased the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by 50 percent compared to where it was for the last few million years," Zeke Hausfather, a research scientist at Berkeley Earth, said in an interview. "There's often a debate between adapting to climate change and mitigating climate change. We don't have the luxury of choosing anymore. We're going to have to do both...."

"Even if we get our act together and reduce our emissions dramatically, and get our emissions all the way down to zero, the world isn't going to cool back down for many centuries, it's just going to stop warming," he said. "For better or worse, this is normal and it's our job to keep something worse from becoming the new normal past this."
Hausfather also told the Post that without La Niña cooling the Pacific ocean, 2022 would have been the second-warmest year on record, behind 2020.

Other stats from the article about 2022:
  • Parts of Antarctica's ice sheet were as much as 70 degrees above normal.
  • China suffered its worst recorded drought ever.
  • Europe experienced its worst drought in 500 years.
  • America had its third-driest year, and in late October 63% of America was experiencing drought conditions — a 10-year high.
  • "Blistering temperatures in India and Pakistan spanning from March to May were so high that pavement buckled."

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2022 Was One of Earth's Hottest Years More

2022 Was One of Earth's Hottest Years

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  • Hottest years (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    So far!

  • Too many people on Earth, all wanting... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by b0s0z0ku ( 752509 ) on Saturday January 14, 2023 @01:39PM (#63208512)
    Too many people on Earth, all wanting an American-type deathstyle, with a giant box of ticky-tacky in the 'burbs and a V8 pickup truck (or 6000+ lb electric truck charged using cheap coal or natgas energy). Education is the solution, but I wouldn't be sad if COVID reduced human fertility by 50% ... there are actually studies that postulate that COVID does cause some reduction. Maybe it's Mother Gaia trying to keep the fleas from breeding on her back.

    • What's dumb is that we could all have houses and trucks if we would accept ones that weren't excessive, and if they were expected to last a lot longer instead of being shiny new churn.

      • But how would the Big Pig Corpirations profit then? Profit before people! Profit before planet! Pave the Earth!
      • I like all the recent doom and gloom articles about 'people buying less phones than ever'... it's like good... you probably don't need a new phone every 2.5 years. Most people probably almost never need a new phone. Unless you're playing the hottest new games on it, you can probably use your 9 year old phone... if not for the non-replaceable battery. What do most people do on their phone? Text, pics, calls, a bit of reddit, a bit of facebook, some dumb tiktoks...

    • No one is preventing you from moving on to better care for your "Mother Gaia."

      But you got what's yours and you're not about to act on your principles, so I guess that's how it works with you Malthusian types.

      • I'm already doing my part ... I live in a city, have an apartment with shared walls (less energy to heat and cool), take clean electric trains whenever possible, commute on foot. There are ways to live a "Western" lifestyle without being a profligate overconsuming pig about it.

        • You are an over consuming pig about it.

          Cities are death zones stripped of all natural life. You carbon killers call that efficiency though. But oh wait, there was that tree you saw once in the nearby park so it's ok.

          Cities are huge heat generators. It is why temperature sensors anywhere near these huge man made unnatural heat islands can not be used to determine long range climate change effects. Because people like you gather in your little death hives and fuck up an entire region.

          And where do you thin

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by XXongo ( 3986865 )

            I'm already doing my part ... I live in a city, ...

            You are an over consuming pig about it. Cities are death zones stripped of all natural life. You carbon killers call that efficiency though.

            That was more or less what the hippies thought sixty years ago. They were wrong.

            Turns out it really is more efficient to pack the human more tightly in zones 'stripped of all natural life" (and leave the other areas untouched) than to take the same number of humans and spread them across a larger area.

            Seems counterintuitive if you grew up in the 60s, but nevertheless it's true.

            Unless you're advocating reducing the population radically, it's better to put the population in cities with a small area, then s

        • No you're not.

          You are consuming at least 10x the resources of someone living in a slum in Delhi or Caracas (probably 100x if we're being honest). Your life is one of luxury in an urban apartment in the West where your so-called "clean" electric trains are likely powered in large part by fossil fuels, not to mention your indoor heating and air conditioning. Billions of people live every day consuming less, emitting less, and living worse than you do, but you don't want them to have better lives and suffer l

    • This isn't really accurate. We're well below the human carrying capacity. It is true that American life style are a major problem, but a major part of that problem is purely from the fossil fuel use. If we had the same lifestyles but with a combination of wind, solar, nuclear, geothermal and hydro power, and people had all EVs, the problem would be greatly reduced. We can have really great lifestyles but we have to actually build the infrastructure to do so.
      • There are still issues of resources and pollution from manufacturing and intensive farming ... CO2 isn't the only issue by a long shot. This being said, I want to move somewhere where they have more trains. Given a choice between the fastest Tesla and moving somewhere with high speed rail, where I can actually interact with other people while I travel. I'd pick the latter.
        • Trains are great, and much better for the environment than cars, and socially better too. But they aren't absolutely necessary, I prefer a world with a lot more trains, but one with a lot of EVs is ok too. Problems from manufacturing and farming are real, but the scale and severity of the problems is not remotely like that of climate change. The only major exception to that is microplastics, but even that is a somewhat small problem compared to climate issues.

        • The reason we need intensive farming is to feed all the city dwellers. You are the recipient of most of that food. And it usually gets shipped or trucked in via dirty diesel from another part of the planet.

          • Cities are more energy efficient than rural areas. Cities need a lot of food simply because there are a lot of people there. And of course, we currently use diesel. That's one of the many things which from an infrastructure standpoint needs to get improved. But electric trucks and electric ships are starting to become more of a thing. There's no intrinsic problem here.

          • The reason we need intensive farming is to feed all the city dwellers.

            ...Because if they lived outside of cities, you wouldn't feed them?

    • US of a mess (to the planet)

  • Humanity is just marching toward it's doom (Score:5, Insightful)

    by rtconner ( 544309 ) on Saturday January 14, 2023 @01:42PM (#63208528) Homepage Journal

    ... and half the people in this comment section are going to make factually incorrect statements and tell themselves global warming is not real. We live in tragically sad times.

    • Those people tend to overlap with anti-vaxxers ... it's a shame that COVID wasn't more lethal or didn't cause sterility in unvaccinated subjects.

      • The amazing power of stupidity is that it can easily overlap many domains.

    • In Portuguese it's called "ecocÃdio" (ecological + suicide)

    • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

      Factually correct:
      1) earth has been much warmer, and much cooler, than today.
      2) For the last 20k years or so, it was cooler.
      3) Before that, periodically warmer back to about 2.5 mya.
      4) Before 2.5 mya, it was MUCH warmer, pretty nearly all the time.
      5) over the last 2.5 million years, about every 120k years, there has been a sudden spike of warming.
      6) the last such spike of warming was about 120k years ago.
      7) no authority (that I'm aware of) has explained how THIS spike in CO2

  • The very early, very harmless beginning in comparison to what is to come.

  • If it's so hit the pavement buckles, who believes what isn't really important. Physical reality makes the arguments mostly irrelevant. You still need to stop the buckling.

    Droughts, floods, fires... the causal determination is less and less important - even strictly academic.

    Regional starvation doesn't care one whit about your mindset.

  • Other than today, I think we've only had two days in the 30s (mid-Atlantic state). Everything else has been in the 40s and even 50s, with a day or two near 60. Next week's forecast is to be in the mid-40s to potentially low 50s with maybe one day in upper 30s.

    Halfway through January and temps this warm? I'll take it. Here's to hoping February is just as warm.

  • https://twitter.com/Konstantin... [twitter.com]

    Can they do something other than throw soup at paintings.

  • "Where does "Global Warming" rank on your list of priorities?"

    It's either going to be at the bottom of the list, or not even present.

    Roughly HALF THE PLANET and . In the countries with the largest impact.

    Their priorities are getting enough to eat, living in (relative comfort) and making sure their kids grow up healthy and with enough food.

    How do they do that? By getting "rich" (relative term) enough to make this a reality.

    The fact that they just HAPPEN to pump out massive emissions isn't even a blip on th

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