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by Centigonal
1462 days ago
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This is why "climate change" is a better term than "global warming." Weather is really really complicated. More greenhouse gases in the air results in more of the sun's energy staying in our atmosphere as heat, but how that affects the ground-level temperature in a specific city can be very, very complicated. Some areas might even become significantly cooler as climate change affects the weather. Plus, many of the worst effects of rising greenhouse gas levels (droughts, hurricanes, wildfires, flooding, algal blooms) are not a direct result of rising temperatures. A climate change indicator with fewer confounding factors than "ASOS temperatures for pseudo-random airports" is ocean acidity level [1] [2] (CO2 gets dissolved in our oceans and changes the pH, affecting marine life). Another one is sea level [3]. [1] https://www.epa.gov/climate-indicators/climate-change-indica... [2] https://www.eea.europa.eu/ims/ocean-acidification [3] https://www.epa.gov/climate-indicators/climate-change-indica... |
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Indeed. The way I currently tend to think about the difference in my head is this: human activity has caused a large amount of extra energy to remain inside the atmosphere. Some of it is in the atmosphere itself, some in the oceans and lakes, some in ice, some in land. You can't trivially predict what a lot of extra energy will do when it ends up in such different storage "media". The obvious conclusion is "global warming", but there's no inherent reason for that to be correct. The extra energy could, for example, all go it into generating humungous sized and crazy fast storm systems, which would result in little change in temperature but very noticeable changes in weather and safety.
Of course, it is unlikely that all the extra energy will be directed into a single phenomena, but the example is enough for me to remember that it's really non-trivial to understand what it could do, let alone predict what it will do.