Prof. Stefan Rahmstorf 🌏 🦣 Profile picture
Nov 3 7 tweets 3 min read Read on X
Latest NASA global temperature data.
Earth has never been hotter since Homo sapiens discovered agriculture in the early Holocene. Likely even since 120,000 years ago.
Fossil coal, oil and gas emissions caused it.
We need to stop making it worse.
Yes, we can if we want to. 🧵 Image
Here is the last 2023 years of data for CO2 (from Antarctic ice core data) and global temperature (from numerous sources of proxy data from around the world, such as sediment and ice cores). Check it out: pastglobalchanges.org/science/wg/2k-…Image
And here's global temperature for the past 24,000 years - since the last Ice Age! Earth is now warming 20 times faster than at the end of the last Ice Age.
(Ice ages are caused by the Earth orbit's Milankovich cycles - modern warming is not.)
Source: nature.com/articles/s4158…Image
And it is Physics 101 that the atmospheric „sponge“ (capacity to hold & move around water) grows exponentially with warming.
(Clausius-Clapeyron law, known since 1834.)
Hence the air sucks more water from soil & plants & seas in dry weather, and pours out more extreme rainfall. Image
Even over time periods of hundreds of millions of years, where it’s plate tectonics which changes atmospheric CO2 levels, CO2 is the main control knob for global temperature.
Homo sapiens emerged only around 300,000 years ago in Africa.

Judd et al 2024: science.org/doi/10.1126/sc…Image
Should anyone be interested in the usual selection of well-worn „climate skeptics“ claims that undoubtedly will appear in the comments, they are all already covered here:

skepticalscience.com
And totally in denial of reality, Trump:
“It used to be global warming but that didn’t work because we’re actually cooling.”

• • •

Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to force a refresh
 

Keep Current with Prof. Stefan Rahmstorf 🌏 🦣

Prof. Stefan Rahmstorf 🌏 🦣 Profile picture

Stay in touch and get notified when new unrolls are available from this author!

Read all threads

This Thread may be Removed Anytime!

PDF

Twitter may remove this content at anytime! Save it as PDF for later use!

Try unrolling a thread yourself!

how to unroll video
  1. Follow @ThreadReaderApp to mention us!

  2. From a Twitter thread mention us with a keyword "unroll"
@threadreaderapp unroll

Practice here first or read more on our help page!

More from @rahmstorf

Oct 21
One feature of global warming is the *energy imbalance* of the Earth: we are absorbing more energy from the sun than we send back to space in form of thermal radiation.
If Earth’s climate were in equilibrium, these two numbers would exactly balance.
The main reason they don’t is the thermal inertia of the ocean. Because the ocean takes a long time to warm up, the warming of the surface ocean lags behind the warming of the land areas.
So the ocean remains cooler and therefore emits less thermal radiation.
93% of the energy imbalance is due to that relatively cool ocean.
If the ocean surface warming didn’t lag behind the land areas, the imbalance would thus largely disappear.
I’ve seen some crazy claims, like: if the ocean did not absorb most of the energy imbalance, then that amount of heat would end up in the atmosphere, heating the Earth by 36 degrees Celsius.
That’s not how this works.
The ocean with its large heat capacity and therefore large heat uptake causes most of the energy imbalance of our planet at a time of rapid global warming. If the ocean didn’t do that, the Earth would only take up a fraction of the heat it does now. It would be a little bit warmer (a few tenths of a degree C) but nothing like 36 C!
That misunderstanding of ocean thermal inertia, is linked to another one: That the Earth will keep warming for decades after we reach zero CO2 emissions, as the oceans catch up with warming. That’s also incorrect.
That idea is not fundamentally wrong, but there is a balancing effect: the CO2 uptake inertia. While the ocean continues warming for some decades, it will also continue taking up CO2 for some decades after we stopped emitting, because of a CO2 concentration imbalance between atmosphere and upper ocean. So the CO2 concentration will decline, and from the point where we reach zero emissions, the warming will likely stop right away.

carbonbrief.org/explainer-will…
A third misunderstanding (that one promoted by climate skeptics) is that we do not need to reduce our CO2 emissions to zero in order to stabilize the concentration, because the ocean takes up 25% of our emissions. However, that is primarily just due to a temporary imbalance and will stop after a few decades, just like the heat uptake will. Much of the increased CO2 will actually remain for many tens of thousands of years in the atmosphere (unless our descendants actively pull it out of the atmosphere).
Read 4 tweets
Sep 14
Wie hängen solche Extremniederschläge wie derzeit mit dem Klimawandel zusammen? Kurzer🧵. 1/x Image
Erstens enthält mit Feuchtigkeit gesättigte Luft pro Grad Erwärmung 7% mehr Wasserdampf. Das ist ein Gesetz von 1834, ich habe es hier erklärt:
Zweitens kommt mehr Wassernachschub durch Verdunstung, wenn das Mittelmeer wie derzeit wärmer ist. 2/x spiegel.de/wissenschaft/c…
Image
Das nennen wir in der Forschung thermodynamische Effekte. Hinzu kommen Veränderungen in der Wetterdynamik, etwa dem Verlauf des Jetstreams oder der zunehmenden Dauer von Wetterlagen (relevant bei mehrtägigem Dauerregen). Das erklärt unser Kommentar. 3/x iopscience.iop.org/article/10.108…
Read 9 tweets
Aug 17
Wo macht ihr in der #Klimakrise lieber Urlaub? Izmir oder Menorca?

Sorry wenn ich mir nach 30 Jahren des Warnens manchmal eine Prise Sarkasmus nicht verkneifen kann.
Read 5 tweets
Aug 12
Vor 22 Jahren - am 12./13. August 2002 - fiel eine nie zuvor in Deutschland innnert 24 Stunden gemessene Regenmenge: 312 mm. Bald stand Dresden unter Wasser, es gab über 11 Milliarden € Schaden. Mein Welt-Interview von damals. 🧵
pik-potsdam.de/~stefan/welt-i…
Inzwischen ist die von mir erwähnte Zunahme der Extremniederschläge noch viel deutlicher in den Messdaten der Wetterstationen hervorgetreten.
Die Häufung liegt inzwischen weit außerhalb der historischen Schwankungen. nature.com/articles/s4161…
2002 dachten wir noch, Begrenzung der Erwärmung auf 2 Grad würde reichen. Doch im Lichte neuer Erkenntnisse, u.a. über Klimakipppunkte, hat sich die Weltgemeinschaft 2015 im Pariser Abkommen auf die Begrenzung auf 1,5 Grad verständigt. Inzwischen leider kaum noch zu schaffen.
Read 4 tweets
Jun 16
Talkshows sollten gut überlegen, ob sie allen Ernstes 2024 immer noch Klimaskeptikerdebatten führen wollen. Kleiner Thread mit Faktenchecks zu den Behauptungen von @Axel_Bojanowski. 1/x
In dem Clip behauptet Bojanowski, er habe nicht bestritten, dass der Meeresspiegelanstieg sich beschleunigt. Hier ist dokumentiert, dass er das z.B. in der SZ sehr wohl getan hat (Zitat: "...also keine Beschleunigung").
2/x scilogs.spektrum.de/klimalounge/me…
Der Spiegel musste einen Bojanowski-Artikel korrigieren, der behauptete, der Wechsel von Pegel- auf Satellitendaten habe eine Beschleunigung des Meeresanstiegs nur vorgetäuscht. Dazu hatte er Forscherkollegen falsch zitiert. Die Story: 3/x scilogs.spektrum.de/klimalounge/sp…

Image
Image
Read 15 tweets
Apr 13
Short thread on the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation #AMOC, which brings a huge amount of heat to the northern Atlantic.
If it slows, the region west of Britain cools. And the Gulf Stream moves closer to the US coast, causing warming there.
Both are already happening, as satellite data show. 1/6Image
Also air temperature data show: remarkably, the northern Atlantic is the only part of the world which has cooled since the 19th Century. 2/6 Image
Could the 'cold blob' in the northern Atlantic (left) be caused by more heat loss at the surface?
To the contrary: the ocean heat loss has declined there (right). And increased where it got warmer, off the US coast. 3/6 Image
Read 7 tweets

Did Thread Reader help you today?

Support us! We are indie developers!


This site is made by just two indie developers on a laptop doing marketing, support and development! Read more about the story.

Become a Premium Member ($3/month or $30/year) and get exclusive features!

Become Premium

Don't want to be a Premium member but still want to support us?

Make a small donation by buying us coffee ($5) or help with server cost ($10)

Donate via Paypal

Or Donate anonymously using crypto!

Ethereum

0xfe58350B80634f60Fa6Dc149a72b4DFbc17D341E copy

Bitcoin

3ATGMxNzCUFzxpMCHL5sWSt4DVtS8UqXpi copy

Thank you for your support!

Follow Us!

:(