It’s Warmer Out There

The data are clear (and the predictions were correct).

It was probably sometime in 1993 that I stood in the parking lot of the apartment complex we lived in in Austin, TX complaining to a dear friend about the cost of air conditioner repairs to our car. I don’t recall all the details exactly, although the overall conversation is quite vivid in my memory. I was complaining either about fees associated with the repairs or about changes in how refrigerants were used under relatively new regulations which made them more expensive (or both). The bottom line was that I was in graduate school and didn’t have a lot of money, so I was complaining about my perception of the costs as related to environmental regulations. I would have preferred a version of the bill without the added costs (or, indeed, no bill at all).

My friend, instead of commiserating, said “Good!”

This, I must confess, annoyed me at the time. All I was worried about was the bill I had to pay (and that car had been an ongoing pain in the ass and pocketbook in terms of its AC–something that was unpleasant to live without in Texas).

However, he was right and I was wrong.

I relay this story for at least two reasons. One is that my friend was correct to be concerned about global warming in ways that I was not at the time and the other is that I think my attitude at the time is indicative of a lot of the core resistance (then and now) to climate change policy.

To the first point, the NYT provides the following graph:

The piece starts thusly,

At the stroke of midnight on Dec. 31, Earth finished up its hottest year in recorded history, scientists said on Friday. The previous hottest year was 2023. And the next one will be upon us before long: By continuing to burn huge amounts of coal, oil and gas, humankind has all but guaranteed it.

The planet’s record-high average temperature last year reflected the weekslong, 104-degree-Fahrenheit spring heat waves that shuttered schools in Bangladesh and India. It reflected the effects of the bathtub-warm ocean waters that supercharged hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico and cyclones in the Philippines. And it reflected the roasting summer and fall conditions that primed Los Angeles this week for the most destructive wildfires in its history.

“We are facing a very new climate and new challenges, challenges that our society is not prepared for,” said Carlo Buontempo, director of the Copernicus Climate Change Service, the European Union monitoring agency.

But even within this progression of warmer years and ever-intensifying risks to homes, communities and the environment, 2024 stood out in another unwelcome way. According to the World Meteorological Organization, it was the first year in which global temperatures averaged more than 1.5 degrees Celsius, or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, above those the planet experienced at the start of the industrial age.

Paul Campos at LGM summarizes this well.

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.

To put all of this as succinctly as possible: that which was predicted by the science has happened. There is no denying this. The world is warmer than it was and we are seeing the consequences.*

The NYT piece shows what kinds of emission reductions would have been necessary in 2005 vs. now to achieve desired outcomes. Let’s just say we didn’t meet them and aren’t going to now (if you click through you can appreciate my dry understatement, pun partially intended).

Back to my anecdote: people don’t like to pay for something that they don’t think they benefit from (and, really, often don’t want to pay for things they do benefit from, preferring instead that others pay either in money or consequences). I think a substantial amount of anti-global warming/climate change politics has been based on fears of either increased regulatory costs (as per my car AC repair decades ago) or worries about increased taxes (I would hypothesize that a huger percentage of climate denial is really about taxation and regulation fears). Indeed, I think these are the main ways that conservatives have mobilized anti-environmental politics. And, of course, it is not hard for Republicans to mobilize simplistic individualism against more collective concerns (that’s socialism, dontcha know!).

At the heart of all of this is the tension between collective action/responsibility and the fantasy that we are all just a bunch of individual masters of our own destinies.

Still, as we have seen with tropical systems, with sea-level rise, with the fires in LA, or even the growing zones across the country, the climate has changed and there are (and are going to be more) consequences. Such problems require serious minds and solutions. Alas, this is not where we are as a country.


*One clear bit of evidence for the changes that come not from liberal politicians nor climate scientists is from insurance costs. This is a clear market-based signal of the problem here which cannot be attributed to some ideologically-driven position. Note: I am not saying climate scientists are ideologically driven, but critics often accuse them of being such. Insurance costs are, however, a useful proxy to demonstrate the obvious effects of a changing climate.

See the CBO: Climate Change, Disaster Risk, and Homeowner’s Insurance.

FILED UNDER: Climate Change, Environment, US Politics, , , , , , , ,
Steven L. Taylor
About Steven L. Taylor
Steven L. Taylor is a retired Professor of Political Science and former College of Arts and Sciences Dean. His main areas of expertise include parties, elections, and the institutional design of democracies. His most recent book is the co-authored A Different Democracy: American Government in a 31-Country Perspective. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Texas and his BA from the University of California, Irvine. He has been blogging since 2003 (originally at the now defunct Poliblog). Follow Steven on Twitter

Comments

  1. Michael Reynolds says:

    We are not going to deal with climate change, it’s too late, so we’re going to have no choice but to adapt as well as we can, and hope that some engineering solutions can be found and scaled up at a superhuman rate. Absent a tech miracle, we’re going to build more seawalls, pay more for food, start shooting desperate people at the border and watch with waning concern as Africa starves.

    Environmentalists are not without fault. Wrong on overpopulation, wrong on nuclear power, and trivial with performative drinking straw bans, campaigns to save one of a thousand species of frog, and paper-or-plastic obsessions. They subverted their own credibility and we desperately needed them to be believed, because this time the wolf is real.

    Which is not in any way to excuse MAGA morons, their lying media, clergy and pols, or the endlessly greedy oligarchs. Environmentalists are bad at politics, Republicans are bad at being human.

    The fucking godawful mess we’re leaving our children. It’s a mystery why they haven’t started building guillotines.

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  2. Rob1 says:

    @Michael Reynolds:

    We are not going to deal with climate change, it’s too late, so we’re going to have no choice but to adapt as well as we can, and hope that some engineering solutions can be found and scaled up at a superhuman rate.

    Bingo.

    But that doesn’t preclude working to reduce human impact to limit the damage.

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  3. Michael Reynolds says:

    @Rob1:

    But that doesn’t preclude working to reduce human impact to limit the damage.

    Unless what you’re doing is convincing well-meaning people that they were saving the earth by making compost piles in their back yards. You can’t tell people, “Godzilla is coming, let’s fight him with paper straws.”

  4. gVOR10 says:

    @Rob1:

    But that doesn’t preclude working to reduce human impact to limit the damage.

    Indeed it doesn’t. But that doesn’t mean various schemes won’t be used as excuses for continuing to not reduce human impact.

    @Michael Reynolds:

    They subverted their own credibility and we desperately needed them to be believed, because this time the wolf is real.

    As is so often the case, “they” is a lumping together of disparate groups. And they individually acted just like people. Fairly or not, nuclear power destroyed itself, Chernobyl, TMI, Fukushima. And climate scientists weren’t worrying about plastic straws, which are a completely separate issue.

    Let’s blame the real villains. I have seen conservatives say AGW is just like CFCs, the scientists hollered wolf, nothing was done, and nothing happened. They’re too ignorant to realize the world took the scientists seriously. The world acted effectively, for which see Prof. Taylor above. And the problem has largely been mitigated, as calculated by said scientists. What’s the difference between CFCs and AGW? There was no big freon lobby!

    AGW deniers in the general public are ignorant, but the real villains are the people who have spent billions creating and feeding their ignorance. And the politicians who were bought by them.

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  5. Tim D. says:

    @Michael Reynolds: We *have* been dealing with climate change, just not nearly enough. Both globally and in the U.S., at least some actions have been taken that have moved us slightly away from worst case scenario. So I take exception to your binary, doomist view of the issue. Every tenth of a degree of mitigation will save greatly on adaptation and will minimize suffering.

    And speaking as an environmentalist, we are certainly not above criticism (indeed, it’s one of our favorite past-times). But I will say this: there is a huge diversity of strategies and messaging in the environmental movement. For every enviro group you think is “doing it wrong” you can certainly find others who are probably doing exactly what you think they should. This diversity of strategies comes because climate change is a very hard problem to fix, and no one knows in advance what will work, so we try lots of things.

    Solutions exist and we are not helpless. The big structural problems are the political power of the incumbent fossil fuel industry, their alliance with con artists like Trump, and the poisoned information ecosystem we now find ourself in. 2025 is a good year to call your representative and go to a climate protest.

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  6. Jen says:

    @Michael Reynolds:

    and watch with waning concern as Africa starves.

    Not just Africa. It’s going to be a problem for all of us, because as temperatures change, growing regions will shift. Things that used to grow well in certain areas won’t anymore.

    Add to your list of things people need to get over themselves about: GMOs. Genetic modification of food crops may well be the ONLY thing that staves off widespread starvation.

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  7. Beth says:

    I was complaining either about fees associated with the repairs or about changes in how refrigerants were used under relatively new regulations which made them more expensive (or both).

    Was it 93? or was it slightly later, like 95-96?* Anyway, I was working for my dad in his truck repair shop. I remember the absolute hissy fit that ostensibly grown men were throwing over this. I was like, I’m a teenager, stop yelling at me, I don’t care. The only thing I remembered caring about was one version of Freon, I don’t remember if it was the old or new, was able to be converted to mustard gas under the right conditions. I think if it burned. That freaked me out.

    @Tim D.:

    For every enviro group you think is “doing it wrong” you can certainly find others who are probably doing exactly what you think they should. This diversity of strategies comes because climate change is a very hard problem to fix, and no one knows in advance what will work, so we try lots of things.

    Don’t worry, who ever isn’t doing it the exact way he wants is bad and stupid and wrong.

    *given my memory issues it’s useful to have other people point out the year something happened. I was old enough to drive, which was 94. Maybe it came later to diesel trucks.

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  8. @Beth:

    Was it 93? or was it slightly later, like 95-96?*

    I know for sure that it was before August of 1994, which was when we moved from that apartment complex in Austin to Bogotá, Colombia. It was post Clinton’s election (so it was post Jan. 93), but 100% Spring of 94 at the latest.

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  9. Michael Reynolds says:

    @gVOR10:
    I do blame the real villains. But I’m out of patience with political incompetence on the Left. Of course it’s lumping together various groups, but that’s always the case. MAGA has different parts, too.

    A movement needs leaders who can set priorities and define a message that’s in touch with political reality. Annoying large numbers of people with irrelevant bullshit like paper straws is just stupid. It makes us look unserious. It makes the issue look unserious. It looks like cheap virtue signaling, and it looks that way because that’s what it is.

    We just got our asses handed to us on environment, abortion and trans rights among other issues – despite the majority of Americans agreeing with us.

    Yes, they are the bad guys, and we are the good guys, that shouldn’t be an excuse for self-righteous imbecility, it should be a motivation for discipline and prioritization. Fight the important battles, not every fucking battle.

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  10. Gustopher says:

    @Michael Reynolds:

    We are not going to deal with climate change, it’s too late, so we’re going to have no choice but to adapt as well as we can, and hope that some engineering solutions can be found and scaled up at a superhuman rate. Absent a tech miracle, we’re going to build more seawalls, pay more for food, start shooting desperate people at the border and watch with waning concern as Africa starves.

    I regret to inform you that this is dealing with Climate Change. Minimizing the impact (to us). But I think you’re wrong about waning concern as Africa starves. We simply won’t give a shit because we are more focused on the cost of eggs.

    Fun fact: more than half of the carbon we have put in the atmosphere has been since Al Gore published his book.

    Environmentalists are not without fault. Wrong on overpopulation

    I’d say they were more premature than wrong. There was a near revolution in food production at that time that basically matched population growth. Climate Change will likely mess that up.

    If we’re “lucky” bird flu will cut the demand for food to match decreased production.

    It does show that we need more interdisciplinary scientists, as all of the building blocks for avoiding mass famine were there while other scientists were doing math on food and population.

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  11. Ken_L says:

    Two stories published today illustrate where America is at. First, Politico:

    It was the wind, they said when I asked them what they blamed, picking through the rubble of their flattened homes, or hugging their neighbors in the middle of streets filled with sooty air. It was God, or population growth, or the way that Californians tucked their homes into the foothills. It was a lack of investment in infrastructure, or the fire hydrants that ran dry.

    It wasn’t that they disagreed with Biden on climate change. In this unincorporated area north of Pasadena, where some precincts went for Kamala Harris over Donald Trump by more than 60 percentage points, nearly everyone I spoke with said they agreed with him.

    It was that in our time of partisan stasis, they didn’t appear to see the point of even raising such a seemingly intractable concern. Part of it was the shock of the event — the overwhelmingness of surveying the damage, of grappling with their loss. And part of it seemed to be a kind of fatalism, a feeling that the more existential the threat, the less our society or our political system seems able to address it.
    https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2025/01/11/altadena-california-fires-climate-change-00197658?nname=playbook&nid=0000014f-1646-d88f-a1cf-5f46b7bd0000&nrid=0000015c-aaaa-d2fe-a17e-fbff4e690000&nlid=630318

    Then, the New York Post:

    Let’s get one thing clear: The goal of net zero carbon emissions ASAP at any price is as foolish as it is evil.

    It is a demand, made by people with enough money to be insulated from its consequences, that advanced industrial states around the world engineer deliberate energy shortages in the name of ending carbon emissions by an arbitrarily chosen date around the middle of this century.

    That means, quite literally, starvation and death for the developing world and horrific declines in living standards within developed countries.

    It’s a cult, and it has nothing to do with science.
    https://nypost.com/2025/01/12/opinion/its-good-that-blackrock-and-jpmorgan-are-pulling-away-from-net-zero/

    When Al Gore chose raising awareness of global warming and its consequences as his life’s work post-politics, American Republicans reflexively agreed it all had to be bullshit. They have managed all by themselves to turn a planetary crisis into one more crude domestic political issue where it is essential to “own the libs”. It was never going to be easy to achieve the kinds of changes necessary to keep warming below 2°C; American Republicans made it impossible.

    I hope they’re proud of what they’ve done.

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  12. James Joyner says:

    @Steven L. Taylor: One of the few advantages of having moved a lot is that I have a pretty good memory of when things happened because of changing backdrops.

    The other thing about 1993 you (and me) is that it’s really hard to get people in their 20s excited about things that might happen 30 years down the road. Hell, my parents turned 40 in 1993. I’m almost half again older now than they were then.

  13. Charley in Cleveland says:

    Ohio’s GOP controlled legislature has given local governments the power to ban wind and solar farms while forbidding similar banning of fossil fuel production/operations. It’s part and parcel of Trump’s hysterical ranting about “wind mills,” and yet another indication of how it doesn’t matter how long term stupid a policy might be, if you have the money there are politicians who will take it.

    1
  14. @James Joyner:

    it’s really hard to get people in their 20s excited about things that might happen 30 years down the road.

    Indeed.

    1
  15. Paul L. says:

    CAGW/CACC Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming (climate change) because 10,000 temperature sensors can accurately track 197 million square miles of atmosphere because interpolation.

  16. Tim D. says:

    @Michael Reynolds: Paper straws are not (directly) about climate change, but are about getting people to think about how much plastic we throw away every day. The point (just to spell it out) is that we are now finding microplastics in our food, in our blood, basically everywhere, with unknown consequences for our health. (And that’s just human impacts, not even getting into impacts on the ocean, etc)

    Now, sure, maybe the strategy should change, but even on that issue it’s not the only angle (e.g. the recent U.N. talks in South Korea were aiming for a global plastics treaty). It only looks like “unserious virtue signaling” if you totally ignore the actual underylying issue.

    1
  17. Tim D. says:

    I’ll also say I’m fascinated by the dynamic that national Democrats are seen to be liable for literally every left-wing idea advanced anywhere in the country, even when they are non-committal or explicitly opposed to it. I think this is because of:
    1. the relentless right-wing noise machine, for which Dems have no response, and
    2. boring national leaders who have no brand and no ability to seize control of the conversation.

    Nothing Biden or Harris said or did broke through, so the opposition was able to caricature them.

    Be less boring, build better media infrastructure!

    1
  18. Matt Bernius says:

    Shorter @Paul L.: area man cannot believe that you can accurately measure body temperature by placing a single thermometer under the tongue, or in an ear, or with a forehead scan–each is well less that 1% of the area of the human body!

    The only way to accurately measure a human body is to give it a complete scan!!!

    Remember, kids, a cabal of dastardly climate scientists sought out the hottest places on the planet and ONLY put thermometers there then covered up their evil plot with scary words like “interpolation” which cannot be defined and really mean lying to the public!

    After all a climate scientist lied once*! So therefore you can’t believe anything they said.

    It’s all a lie.

    * – Note don’t pay attention to all the documentation of Fossil Fuel funded scientists intentionally lying and misleading with data. Ditto all the mistakes pointed out in their work that they never responded to. It’s critical you only care that the side you disagree with did something wrong at some point. That immediately negates any mistakes or dissembling done by the side you support.

    In fact, this just proves that you can’t trust anything–so therefore you cannot trust that Global Warming is happening.

    But that also means you can trust that Global Warming isn’t happening… And no, there is absolutely no contradiction in what I am saying….

    3
  19. Matt Bernius says:

    @Tim D.:

    The big structural problems are the political power of the incumbent fossil fuel industry, their alliance with con artists like Trump, and the poisoned information ecosystem we now find ourself in. 2025 is a good year to call your representative and go to a climate protest.

    While I agree with just about everything you wrote, I think one challenge we have is over-emphasizing the impact of the “fossil fuel industry” in this. Without a doubt, they cast a LONG shadow–especially in creating most of the disinformation that plauges us to this day. They got the denialist ball in motion and rolling fast.

    However, I’m not sure they are the biggest obstacle at all. In fact, I think they could pretty much end their resistance to change today, and we’d still have long-standing issues due to how much of our infrastructure is still set up for that paradigm and the resulting impact on the costs of goods (and the need to change behavior at all levels).

    An equally huge issue (seemingly insurmountable at times) is the distributed nature of our government. This creates all sort of infrastructure problems. The Feds can move on freeing up infrastructure transformation dollars, but the States still need to act. And often these things go down to the local level for the actual change to happen. This creates lots of opportunities to gum up the transformation works (see, for example, all the failures in speedily improving rural broadband access in the US).

    Tl;dr: increasingly, I don’t think there is no one overly determining factor or bad guy in this story. Which makes everything more challenging.

    BTW, this is an area where it would be great to hear from Lousberry as this is his area of expertise.

    3
  20. Paul L. says:

    @Matt Bernius:
    So the temperature of a person’s big toe or index finger is the same as a person’s under the tongue, or in an ear, or with a temporal lobe scan? I must have gotten disinformation about the body will try to keep the core temperature up at the expense of the extremities.
    What are the mechanisms in the Earth’s atmosphere to make the temperature homogeneous throughout?
    A fever is an elevated body temperature due to any cause. Fevers occur as a result of the body’s defenses against disease.

  21. Paul L. says:

    under the tongue, or in an ear, or with a temporal lobe scan–each is well less that 1% of the area of the human body

    So just measure a finger.

  22. @Matt Bernius: Let me add and re-emphasis something I said in the OP: I think a lot of people (and I mean, a lot) engage in motivated reasoning to ignore climate change because they don’t want to have their costs to increase (e.g., the AC bill, taxes, other costs, includig behaviors).

    I think this is the key to the whole thing. (Really, when it boils right down to it, it is an absolute core of most conservative politics).

    And that isn’t said to let the fossil fuel industrusty off the hook.

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  23. @Paul L.: Weirdly, just as a biologists can tell you how best to measure the body temperature of a human being, climatologists can tell you how to measure climate.

    Glib obfuscations don’t disprove this.

    And, as noted, many of the predictions made are coming to pass. You can’t just ignore that. (Well, you can, but that’s on you).

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  24. Tim D. says:

    @Matt Bernius:

    we’d still have long-standing issues due to how much of our infrastructure is still set up for that paradigm and the resulting impact on the costs of goods (and the need to change behavior at all levels).

    I definitely agree. Climate change would still be a hard problem even if we had a high-level of alignment on it. Not for nothing have people compared it to the WW2 mobilization.

    One clarification: when I talk about the “power of the fossil fuel industry” I think I mean two things. One is the more direct issues of lobbying, campaign cash, disinformation, etc. that you mentioned. But I would also include the idea of “lock-in”, which is that every investment in new fossil infrastructure creates jobs, contractors, loans, purchase agreements, tax revenue for cities/states, etc. All of that creates resistance to change, not from nefarious back room deals, but just regular inertia. Which is why building a new pipeline or LNG export terminal that will last for 30-50 years is so damaging.

    So I think we are perhaps talking about the same thing.

  25. Matt Bernius says:

    @Paul L.:
    That wooshing sound is the point going over your head… or perhaps you are still advocating that the only way to know a human body temperature is to measure the whole body.

    2
  26. Matt Bernius says:

    @Tim D.:

    But I would also include the idea of “lock-in”, which is that every investment in new fossil infrastructure creates jobs, contractors, loans, purchase agreements, tax revenue for cities/states, etc

    (or rely on) fossil fuels and greenhouse-raising technologies to function.

    So I think we are perhaps talking about the same thing.

    More or less, I think I’m just looking a bit more broadly.

    2
  27. mattbernius says:

    @Charley in Cleveland:

    Ohio’s GOP controlled legislature has given local governments the power to ban wind and solar farms while forbidding similar banning of fossil fuel production/operations.

    BTW, this is exactly what I mean when I say that or multiple levels of government make it really easy to detail projects.