IPCC climate crisis report delivers ‘final warning on 1.5C’
Just in case it saves one person the effort to research this themselves ... for some reason I find the measurement of climate change in units of temperature a bit problematic (though entirely rational). It tends to suggest the old bugbear of "global warming", which of course gets translated by deniers (& skeptics) into "well it's colder here so that's wrong".<p>I spent a while digging in to try to get some numbers on a different sense of what's happening. Global average temperature is changing because extra energy is being retained within the boundary of the planet's atmosphere [0]. So how much extra energy is being retained?<p>A best guess estimate from 2015 would appear to be that<p>>  the earth is getting about 300 terawatt hours of energy per hour due to anthropogenic climate change, and humans use about 16 terawatt hours of energy per hour.<p>That is, the earth is <i>gaining 18x more energy per hour than we use every hour</i>, thanks to the changes in radiative forcing driven by climate change contributors.<p>[0] anyone familiar with complex physical systems will understand that when you add energy to such a system, the effects are often hard to predict. It is very likely that the temperature of the system will rise, but you may also see, for example, more movement as well (which is in some sense a related concept to "temperature" but not identical, and it adds uncertainty because it of the extra degrees of freedom).