Climate change blues

This article (gift link) lays out how 2024 was the hottest year in the historical record globally, and exceeded the +1.5 C. over the pre-industrial baseline benchmark, that has been a focus of climate activism.

The data in it drive home an interesting chapter in the history of science, which is this: By 1980 or so there was a very powerful theoretical basis for thinking that anthropogenic carbon emissions were bound to heat up the planet in a serious way. But up to that point the empirical evidence for this theory was still largely missing. If you look at the charts in the article, you’ll see that by the late 1970s global temperatures still remained very close to the preindustrial baseline.

So at that point, climate science consisted of a lot of people warning that what has since happened was going to happen, while at the same time having to deal with the fact that it wasn’t happening yet. This of course made any kind of ameliorative policy initiatives completely impossible, at a time when such initiatives would have been exponentially cheaper to undertake than they are now.

The horrific ongoing situation in Los Angeles, which is clearly related to long term changes in the local climate, will hopefully focus attention on how serious the situation has become.