Global warming appears to have shifted into a faster gear. After removing the effects of El Niño, volcanic eruptions, and solar cycles, researchers found that the planet has warmed at roughly 0.35°C per decade over the past ten years, compared with just under 0.2°C per decade from 1970 to 2015. The acceleration, which becomes visible around 2013 to 2015, appeared across five major global temperature datasets with more than 98% statistical certainty.
While it’s hard to make things better, it’s easy to make things worse. It can always get worse and giving up means it will
It’s more important than ever to advocate for change. To do what you can, both personally and with whatever influence you have, either in your social circle or through your consumer practices, or voting.
As a citizen of the US, we seem to be the main villain here. We are making some progress, maybe more than you’d think, but the denial, the politics, the spite and racism means we’re not getting as much done as we need to. A year ago we had corporations on board, we had half the stars on board, we had many major cities on board. Then we got run over by a giant coal rolling monument to excess that modern pickups are. Time to get up, dust ourselves off, and get things moving again
Even if everyone on the planet agreed to go completely “green” or whatever, we are pretty much past the tipping point of no return I feel.
Depends on what you mean by tipping point and it’s an important distinction.
You are right that we are not only stuck with climate change but have zoomed past the target that might have left reasonably adaptable changes. We’re leaving a real challenge for the next generation. But if that’s the result and civilization survives the resulting instability, the climate should recover for our great grandchildren.
The bigger challenge is “tipping point”. I don’t know if that’s what you meant but there are a series of projected climatic tipping points that will not only make things markedly worse for humans but are permanent (on the scale of human civilization). I don’t believe we’re able to predict any with any accuracy but I recall a prediction that were already greater than 50% of having triggered at least one. These are things like AMOC collapse, melting of Greenland glaciers, melting west Antarctic ice shelf, etc
We’ve seen in the news repeatedly this summer the Greenland ice sheet melting faster than ever, causing a slowdown of AMOC currents …. So they also build on each other and we don’t yet know whether/when the tipping point is locked in, when there’s no longer any hope of preventing it