The Climate Brink 2023 wrap up
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Happy New Year to all our readers! In this first post of 2024, Zeke and Andy talk about climate change in 2023.
There’s been a lot written about 2023, but here are two particularly good summaries of where we are: Bob Henson and Jeff Masters’s “Ten ‘you must be kidding’ weather and climate facts of 2023” talks about how remarkable the weather of 2023 was while Bill McKibben’s “An Odd Silence” talks about why, despite the ‘gobsmackingly bananas’ weather we’ve been having, it’s hard for climate change to get traction in the public discourse.
We extend our heartfelt thanks to all the readers and subscribers of The Climate Brink. Your ideas and suggestions are invaluable to us, so please share them in the comments!
Happy New Year, everyone!
I know everyone is hesitant to speculate too much on the heat wave of 2023 but doesn't it almost have to be some enhanced heat exchange from the ocean to the atmosphere? I think you both agree it is not Hunga Tonga and it is not some "aerosol termination shock." The only process that has been identified that can act on this short time-scale is something that is "El Nino like."
When I look at the MEI.v2 for 2023, https://psl.noaa.gov/enso/mei/ , I can't help but notice how deep the negative swing is compared to other El Ninos. Maybe we need to think about defining El Nino in terms of the temperature swing or delta instead of a threshold of +0.5 C.
Been great reading the Substack this year; a much better venue for good research than The Platform Formerly Known As Twitter. In the next year, it'd be great to have a serious breakdown of whether climate change under *plausible* scenarios is likely to cause civilizational collapse. As a young person trying to figure out whether there's much point to long-term planning, it'd be helpful to have two climate scientists (both with kids) chime in as to what's rational to expect, given that the dominant view among scientists and certainly activists seems to be that collapse is inevitable.