1966 utenti della rete avevano questa curiosità: Spiegami why an increase in temperatures by just 1 to 1.5°C is so fatal for the planet
Hey there!
With climate change being a hot topic for a while now I've always wondered why an increase in global temperature by numbers that are seemingly as marginal as 1.5°C have such horrendous consequences for life on the planet.
Not doubting or anything, really just looking to understand it better!
Ed ecco le risposte:
This was the description that helped me the most: today we average 29 days below freezing at place wherever. If the average temperature rose +T degrees, then we’d only average 19 days below freezing. That means an average of 10 more days per year where ice is melting.
So a small increase in average temperature could result in many more days of ice melting each year.
It is not fatal for life on this planet. The earth has been hotter and there was still life. It certainly is fatal for many species however when their habitat disappears. It can be destructive for our human societies when food production struggles and large areas become inhospitable. It’s the wars, famines and mass-migration that are going to be catastrophic for our world as we now know it.
That’s an average increase, not just over a few days. This usually means much more than 1.5 degree extremes which overall add up to a 1.5 degree increase. That’s little bit of temperature is actually a ton of energy sticking around. This extra energy can “concentrate” into certain effects resulting in things like really big storms, droughts, rising sea levels, and so on. Moreover things like animals not liking the heat, plants dying to frost, or fish not getting enough oxygen are related to these temperature swings.
an increase in 1°C doesn’t mean every place gets 1° more all the time (which would also be very bad). some places get 10° more for 10% of the year which can dry out lakes or result in much more rain somewhere else.
if you sit in a 200° oven for just a few minutes your average room temperature for that day barely increased but you would probably try to avoid that
Think about it in the other direction, I think it was about 4 degrees cooler during the ice age that had glaciers covering all of Canada and stretching down to new york. So what seems like small numbers represent massive amounts of change in the environment.
I think that one of the biggest communication errors that people advocating for climate change mitigation have done is not properly explain what these average temperature numbers actually mean.