As climate catastrophe looms ever closer, some opinion leaders still hold fast to the view that we must not mention the seriousness of our plight for fear of demoralizing people.
But how could we explain to our children, in some dystopian future of runaway global warming, that we held back from telling the truth at a time when human action could still have made a difference? It’s time to talk honestly about the climate emergency and what we need to do to save human civilization and the precious ecosystems on which we depend. Jane Morton, author of Making the case for emergency climate action
The media is absent regarding the extreme scientific data emerging regarding the climate crisis. So is the Biden Administration and every other leader on earth. The scientists are not. Those that have not been chased off social media or threatened with murder by the extremists unleashed by Elon Musk to discredit the climate emergency still bravely remain on Twitter. That is where I find their tweets of ignored scientific truths and bring them to you.
"The net energy imbalance is calculated by looking at how much heat is absorbed from the Sun and how much is able to radiate back into space,it is not yet possible to measure the imbalance directly, the only practical way to estimate it is through an inventory of the changes in energy."17 C is 62.6 F. A new record smashed this time for the global average temperature.
Scientist Steve Turton writes in the creative commons site The Conversation:
Recent spikes in ocean heat content and average global air temperature have left climate scientists across the world scrambling to find the cause. The global average air temperature, relative to 1850-1900, exceeded the 1.5℃ lower Paris Agreement threshold during part of March and the first days of June. This last happened in 2020, and before that during the powerful 2015-16 El Niño.
What makes these most recent temperature spikes so alarming is that they’ve occurred before a forecast El Niño event in the Pacific, rather than during one.
It is now clear that Earth’s climate system is way out of kilter and we should be very concerned.
We already know El Niño events are associated with above-average global temperatures. Given the impending El Niño, we all need to take extra notice of what lies ahead for the next few years. This is especially so as this forecast warming event will follow the recent rare triple La Niña event that usually brings cooler average global temperatures, meaning the trajectory of this year’s uptick in average temperatures is likely to be even steeper.
Since 1971, about 89 % of the excess heat in Earth’s climate system has been stored in the ocean (with 6 % on land, 1 % in the atmosphere, and about 4 % going towards melting ice on land and sea).
Because of this, any significant upward trend in average ocean heat is considered a harbinger for the acceleration of human-driven climate change more generally.
Scientists monitor the status of Earth’s energy imbalance by considering how much the average sea-surface temperature differs from the historical average, for a vast slice of the oceans covering everywhere between the Arctic Circle (60°N) and Antarctic Circle (60°S). These “sea surface temperature anomalies” are calculated each month, relative to the 1971-2000 baseline.
The global sea surface temperature anomaly on June 13 was about 4.5 standard deviations above the baseline global average. Put another way, this means the likelihood of current temperatures happening totally at random, if the climate this month was unchanged from the baseline period, are about 1 in 1.2 million.
This anomaly is so far above record levels it is judged almost statistically impossible to a have occurred in a climate without human-induced global heating.
A range of natural and human climate drivers are behind this record global energy imbalance. These include rapidly declining sea ice in Antarctica and unusually warm temperatures in many parts of the world.
The early arrival of El Niño may also be playing a lesser role, as the warming in the central and eastern equatorial Pacific is not expected to peak until next year. The submarine volcano Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha'apai erupted in January 2022 and ejected record-breaking amounts of water vapour into the stratosphere. Water vapour acts as a potent greenhouse gas, and this may be contributing to the currently observed warming.
Views from the satellites GOES-West and Himawari-8 of the violent eruption of the underwater volcano Hunga Tonga-Hunga Haʻapai. It blasted an enormous plume of water vapour into Earth’s stratosphere – enough water to fill more than 58,000 Olympic-size swimming pools. Public Domain.
I block-quoted Leon’s tweet as I want to make sure everyone reads every word. It is an important message of what we must do to try to get ourselves out of this mess.
In an earlier tweet from Leon Simons:
This might be the year everything changes, as those who don't count joules and radiative fluxes are too starting to feel the heat from reducing air-pollution.Many great scientists have tried to inform on this in the past decades (e.g. James Hansen, James Lovelock, Paul Crutzen and Veerabhadran Ramanathan).Policy makers and media have paid very little attention so far. This was the reason for me to start using my largely dormant Twitter account 3.5 years ago. To create awareness about rapid warming from rapidly reducing air pollution.There's mainly been a small crowd of 'climate doomers' and slightly anoyed climate scientists to interact with. In the past months this changed, as the additional accumulating heat is starting to surface. My amount of followers has tripled, the graphs we make receive millions of views and media around the world are paying attention.This is bigger than any one of us. We need specialized scientists to assess what this means for changes to monsoon systems, others that look at how ocean and atmospheric currents (might) change and how that could impact melting ice and sea level rise. We need politicians, legal experts and social scientists to learn what is at stake and debate the effects of unintentional and intentional emissions on climate, not just health and the environment. There are no easy choices in this.How much warming will the world except? And how fast can the rate of warming be until we are unable to adapt?When will we learn how high our dikes really need to be? How extreme will droughts get? How many people will lose their homes and need to move to greener pastures? Be it a locally overflowing refugee camp or to another country?Will we have the stability of global governance to face these accumulating challenges?Uncertainties are very large, which might be the main problem. We don't know how bad it will get, and anyone who tells you one way or another is lying.The precautionary principle tells us we have the duty to act. For ourselves, for our children and for strangers we will never meet.We are the most adaptable species known to ever have existed.I believe that with a more thorough understanding of our planet, humanity could become a beneficial force to life on Earth. If we soon aquire collective will to do so.