Is it a mainstream position that we’d get ~20°C warming from burning all the fossil fuels? I thought we’d usually expect a lower (but still very bad!) temperature change from burning all the fossil fuels:
The Earth is not at risk of becoming like Venus. We have done climate model simulations in which all available fossil fuels were burned and the resulting CO2 released into the atmosphere. The planet warmed up about 10 °C in these simulations. This was enough to melt all of the ice sheets and produce 60 meters of sea-level rise, but in no such simulation does the Earth become anything like Venus.
Thanks for flagging this. I think estimating temperature rise after burning all available fossil fuels is mostly educated guesswork. Both estimating the total amount of fossil fuels is hard and estimate the climate response from them is hard.
However, I hadn’t seen this Winkelmann, et al. paper, which makes a valuable contribution. It suggests that the climate response is substantially sub-linear at higher levels of warming.
The notes that are currently posted above about how warm it would get if we burned all the fossil fuels were back-of-the-envelope calculations that I did in this slides’ notes, and I wouldn’t trust them much. They assume a linear model which isn’t reliable at these temperatures. I didn’t end up including them in the talk as I didn’t think they were robust enough. I’ll ask Louis about removing them.
Thanks for the quick response, and really appreciate your (and Louis’s) hard work on getting this type of sophisticated/nuanced information out in a way that other EAs can easily understand!
Is it a mainstream position that we’d get ~20°C warming from burning all the fossil fuels? I thought we’d usually expect a lower (but still very bad!) temperature change from burning all the fossil fuels:
From
https://climatefeedback.org/claimreview/earth-is-not-at-risk-of-becoming-a-hothouse-like-venus-as-stephen-hawking-claimed-bbc/
Linked paper here:
https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/1/8/e1500589. (Eyeballing the graphs, it looks like a 12°C change* at the highest).
*The median estimate is 10 °C, with 12 °C being the upper end.
Thanks for flagging this. I think estimating temperature rise after burning all available fossil fuels is mostly educated guesswork. Both estimating the total amount of fossil fuels is hard and estimate the climate response from them is hard.
However, I hadn’t seen this Winkelmann, et al. paper, which makes a valuable contribution. It suggests that the climate response is substantially sub-linear at higher levels of warming.
The notes that are currently posted above about how warm it would get if we burned all the fossil fuels were back-of-the-envelope calculations that I did in this slides’ notes, and I wouldn’t trust them much. They assume a linear model which isn’t reliable at these temperatures. I didn’t end up including them in the talk as I didn’t think they were robust enough. I’ll ask Louis about removing them.
Thanks for flagging this Linch!
Thanks for the quick response, and really appreciate your (and Louis’s) hard work on getting this type of sophisticated/nuanced information out in a way that other EAs can easily understand!
No worries—edit made.