Temperatures last month were 0.1C above the record set in January 2024. And it comes after a year in which temperatures topped 1.5C, the target for climate negotiations, for the first time. Last month was the warmest January on record, according to new data.
The finding has baffled scientists, who had expected changes in ocean currents in the Pacific to take the edge off rising global temperatures.
Figures released by the European Copernicus climate service show average temperatures around the world in January were 1.75C warmer than before greenhouse gas emissions started to rise significantly in the industrial revolution around 150 years ago.
That’s 0.1C above the record set last January. And it comes after a year in which temperatures topped 1.5C, the target for climate negotiations, for the first time.
Dr Friederike Otto, a climate scientist at Imperial College London, warned that the rising pace of climate change would increase the risk of extreme weather and its consequences.
“This January is […]
“Climate Change” forecasts are a bit like weather forecasts. Often they’re very accurate, sometimes they miss by a mile, but mostly when it comes global mean to temperature trends and sea level rise the observed changes today are significantly larger than the predictions of a few years ago. I understand enough about how both weather and climate predictions are made to understand why this is the case. In a nutshell, climate and weather systems are extremely complex and we simply can’t measure all the variables in all the places that will ultimately end up being decisive. We have vastly more data and measurements now than just a few years ago but the earth is big and you can’t put weather instruments everywhere to measure everything. We can only model with the data we have. When the observations vary from the predictions it generally means one of two things. One, it could be the result of something for which we have little or inadequate data so our models don’t know about that thing or it could be that our data is flawed.
In this case of an unpredicted temperature spike Hanson’s explanation is that the IPCC data on the albedo effect of aerosols from sulphur in ship fuel was an underestimte. Aerosols block sunlight and have a cooling effect. This effect has been measured on land, typically in areas where there is background aerosol pollution. We can measure what an increase or decrease in that aerosol pollution does to albedo and with that information we estimated the impact of the reduction in the use of high sulphur fuel oil after 2020 due to tighter pollution regulations. The problem was, according to Dr. James Hanson, that the impact of adding some aerosols where there is almost no background pollution is vastly greater than adding the same amount where there is already quite a bit. In the open ocean there is almost no background aerosol pollution so a single ship’s effluent has a much larger effect on promoting cloud formation than the same quantity of effluent has in an already polluted terrestrial environment downwind from an industrial city, for instance. Thus, when the aerosols were dramatically reduced due to the use of cleaner fuel on major shipping routes there was a far greater reduction in cloud formation and thus albedo than earlier data predicted. That resulted in much more sunlight hitting dark water and heating it up than the models predicted due to that incorrect estimate of the cooling effect of aerosols in pristine open ocean air.
With reference to your work on Remote Viewing the question occurs to me as to whether Remote Viewing could help detect such errors earlier and even make climate predictions to augment current methodology.
I’ve recently stumbled upon an outfit claiming to do very scientific Remote Viewing calling itself the Farsight Institute. (farsight,org) They make some rather wild claims and I’m not qualified to do any “peer review” on their work but some of it looks rather suspect to me. I’m not sure if they are mostly just sensationalising the field and making stuff up to attract an audience to make money or doing real research and using “glossy presentation” in order to spread important information more widely.
One thing they say about reliability of predictions of future events is that there exist “multiple timelines” so a remote viewer might be accurately seeing events in the future on a different timeline such that those events never transpire in our timeline. That would mean that what can be seen of the future is what “could happen” rather than what “will happen”. This of course raises the whole issue of predestination. Is the future already written? Are we’re just watching the movie with an illusion of free will? Or are we all writing the script for the future day by day such that we can “change the future” if we change what we do now?
There is evidence (from you among others) that remote viewing can help archaeology discover otherwise invisible data. Could it help climatologists also?
Do you know anything about that “Farsight” outfit or have any reflections on predestination or multiple timelines with reference to remote viewing or free will Stephan?
Thanks in advance,
DT
Here in Pennsylvania where I live, we’ve had the COLSEST January in the last 35 years, so I must be living on another planet.
Sorry: that should have said “COLDEST”.