This is an important graph about our climate, by climate scientist Leon Simons. About the loss of Global Dimming and our having crossed the 2 C climate target.
Something incredible is happening to our climate. Hold on now. It's not only Antarctica (see this recent blogpost of mine), it's the loss of Global Dimming and rapid increase in absorbed solar radiation. Observe that according to the very important and crucial climate professor Andrew Glikson, a 2 W/m2 rise in absorbed solar radiation is equal to a 2 C of warming. He says that we are already above the preindustrial baseline by so much, at least. This he said in his 2020 book "The event horizon". This book should have made headlines all over the world, but it didn't. Only outcasts like Guy McPherson and Sam Carana picked up the information. It was silenced, and we buried our heads in the sand, and continued to speak about the 1,5 C and the 2 C climate targets, as if Glikson was nothing, as if he wasn't a scientist and a professor at all, as if he was just a crank and a quack. As if we had all the time in the world to act. As if we had a big carbon budget. As if we could continue living our destructive lives. In fact, the 1,5 C and 2 C climate targets were our excuse to continue business as usual, in some strange and rotten way.
But now to the main point of this blogpost:
This graph is from this tweet on June 7, 2023 by Dutch climate researcher Leon Simons:
In this tweet from March 2023, Simon writes:
"The peak global cooling/dimming effect from shipping is uncertain, but in scale potentially equal to the warming effect of ~20 years of current GHG emissions:"
Since 2020, there has been a more than 80 % reduction in sulphur content from global shipping. What would the warming effect be from that? 20 years of GHG (greenhouse gas) emissions translates to a warming of mostly about 0,40 C, assuming a temperature rise of 0,18-0,20 C per decade (1). More than 80 % of 0,40 C is more than 0,32 C.
So the loss of Global Dimming from the reduction of sulphur content in global shipping could make global mean temperature to rise more than 0,32 C in the near future. This is almost incredible. If we are now at more than 2 C above preindustrial (2,29 C according to Sam Carana), we will be above 2,5 C above preindustrial soon. Remember also the 0,06-0,07 C rise from the loss of Antarctic sea ice, which I calculated in this blogpost. If one adds that, one comes close to a 0,4 C rise, which is incredibly much in climate circumstances, and is a pace that wild animals and wild plants cannot keep up with, driving them to extinction fast.
This recent YouTube video by professor Guy McPherson, one who for many years has warned about the loss of Global Dimming, also gives us some perspectives on this graph, also quoting Leon Simons. This pretty young scientist has written several scientific papers (this is one) with James Hansen, the grandfather of climate science.
Here is a YouTube interview with Leon Simons three months ago.
Expect to see rapid increases in global mean temperatures in the future.
In this tweet on July 28, 2023, Leon Simons had this graph:
(1) "According to an ongoing temperature analysis led by scientists at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), the average global temperature on Earth has increased by at least 1.1° Celsius (1.9° Fahrenheit) since 1880. The majority of the warming has occurred since 1975, at a rate of roughly 0.15 to 0.20°C per decade." (from this NASA article)
