PS Reply to JCM

You often get me thinking and triggering other things (and memories in really odd ways) I’m aware of, to varying degrees of knowledge, but which closely tie in to the experiences you have and see and report on here now and then.

examples . This re-shaping of the surface climate response function deserves scrutiny.
Approximately 100 million hectares are reportedly degraded annually,
with the widespread introduction of chemical biocides. The possibility that these changes have altered energy and water balances, and contributed an additional radiative forcing, deserves investigation
something with diffuse, cumulative impacts that may go largely unnoticed until you remove the guardrail. and so on, which in my mind the “guardrail” might well be seen as the rapid heating acceleration; soon perhaps “The Great Acceleration” :-)

Anyway, it’s not straight forward nor linear thinking so I’m forced instead to reflect a little here and a little there, on the issues of the complex (and unseen) coupling that JCM constantly is pointing out, despite the rationales and logic, not only the evidence, is being repeatedly trashed and rejected out of hand here.

So the first things that I think people are misunderstanding is we’re no longer in minor impairments and adjustments phase. Right? So it’s not the future either. We’ve already leapfrogged that. I posit what was subtly hidden under the surface appearances (or data if you will) and our conscious awareness (except to a few) is now arising to be seen, observed iow, all of a sudden under high stress. Across domains not only climate.

Second thing, there is a lot of work being done at all kinds of levels on projects social scientific financial and governance what have you, few are aware of, there are non-official networks sharing knowledge, just one example, is a bioregion in Spain. What you start to realize is that we’ve got a regressive coupling of systems starting to happen, where runaway monocultural forests — which were used for charcoal production — have now dried the soil to the point where the soil and the mycelium have died. It’s a monoculture, effectively. The fauna has been killed off by hunting and other game theory games.

And built upon that, what you’ve got now is the white clouds that used to come from the Mediterranean Sea, because the forests aren’t releasing moisture, are rising above and sailing past. So that landscape is now in a self-drying cyclic environment. The old climate is well and truly ‘dead’ now. A new regime has evolved and this has impacts on all the adjoining coupled regions and climatic modes. Everything is connected. Remember the European and North American coastline heatwaves a few years back? Extremely high sea temperatures afflicted this region of Spain too. That created changes and is another small piece of all these (typically unseen not rated as important enough) coupled interrelationships. Things not tracked by Nasa or Noaa or Copernicus.

When it does rain in winter in northern Spain now, the ground is so compacted that it flushes away all the nutrients, because the fauna is no longer coming into that environment. The micronutrients aren’t coming. So you’ve got a collapse of, effectively, the mycelium infrastructure and nutrient base. The depopulation of the region means that people don’t care, because people aren’t embedded in the environment, and the demographics to care aren’t there.

When you start coupling these systems, as they’re now coupling regressively, we find ourselves in a moment of bioregional regime shifts of desertification and abandonment in parts of the system, because these systems are reverting, decoupling or are coupling in this way. So I think the number one thing they’re finding in a urgent wake up call is that our knowledge is predominately single-systems orientated. It’s not system-coupled effects. And I think that means that if you’re not aware of the coupling risks, you’re not cognizant as to what that does. You know, and this is pretty much unfolding globally these days, the land value is now $1,500 per hectare in that environment; the total liabilities of fire and due to other things are $20,000. So the economics is collapsing fundamentally as we see it, and those are just two scenarios that start to see. The landscape is becoming unaffordable and unmanageable, and uninsurable: unlivable.

Then you know, food systems collapse in a cascade. Actually, we’re about to see a major event now, probably between end of 2026 and ’27, driven by super El Niño effect and the Straits of Hormuz conflict. Because those two environments are going to collide in terms of a nutrition risk. The problem is not just nutrition. The problem is the pass-through where inequality — as you get these moments, what you’ll see is a whiplash effect, and the whiplash effect on price will mean inequality will shoot up. The haves and have nots become recognizable in the real time. Because it’s not about uneven distribution, there’s not enough to distribute anyway; it’s what this does to social systems, and financial systems will accelerate that.

That whiplash effect will massively drive inequality. That inequality will make the social contract fragile and weaponizable. Note the end point is the weaponizing of that fragile social contract, that all citizens are equal and have the same value-well we’re about find they don’t. Because whole segments of society are about to be suddenly pushed outside the favoured space of the more secure In-group. Which means the incentives for war and conflict massively accelerate in a resource environment that, financiers, investors, the movers and shakers of the world will be forced to see what that’s looking like. And no one was expecting it so soon.

Well, let me play devil’s advocate: AI is going to solve all this. Right? :-) Apologies if that’s all a little too esoteric for some preferences. But this is where we are today. The old ways and norms no longer apply. :-)

Read this and at the end of the post is the solution to the Longitude Prize — the 18th century equivalent to today’s Millenium Problems
https://geoenergymath.com/?p=7335

Reply to JCM
The possibility that these changes have altered energy and water balances, and contributed an additional radiative forcing, deserves investigation.

Understood ,and I agree. Thanks for your comments. I still think it’s better to direct this toward Hansen et al and others interested in that research. I don’t know how to get such things on the agenda, as even Hansen has difficulty there, despite doing research papers to little effect. Pilloried if you do, pilloried if you don’t? :-)

All the best JCM

It’s always been a fundamental communications problem yet still the global climate community cannot or will not solve it.

Multiple baselines are a genuine communication failure. There’s no scientific reason why the public-facing number couldn’t be standardized to one baseline—1850–1900, since that’s the Paris Agreement reference—while keeping the technical datasets in whatever baseline each institution prefers internally. The fact that this hasn’t been done, 30+ years after the UNFCCC, is a legitimate indictment of coordination in the field.

The multiple baselines come from each institution building its dataset independently, at different times, for different purposes. NASA GISS started in the 1980s with 1951–1980 because that was the period with the best station coverage. HadCRUT used 1961–1990. ERA5 uses 1991–2020 because WMO updated its “climate normal” guidance. Nobody coordinated, and nobody was forced to.

That’s institutional inertia for you. It is not 1951 anymore. Or is it? The negative effects continue on including confusion and dysfunctional communication to the public, politicians, environmentalist groups, everyday bureaucrats and the media is very real: because it creates confusion that benefits inaction and the deniers! It stuns me that Piotr isn’t on the case here already; backed up by a communication campaigners like Levenson, Martin Smith, John Pollock or Ray Ladbury and Secular Animist and world’s #1 anti-denier disinformation crusader Atomsk’s Sanakan. Don’t they care enough? :-)

The long established Communication Critique goes like this: Climate scientists are trained to communicate with each other, not with the public. The reward structure in academia rewards precision and caveats, not clarity. The IPCC reports are written by committee, which produces language designed to survive review by 190 governments—not to be understood. The result is a body of public communication that is technically defensible and practically useless for most people.

The RC crowd’s response—”it’s not the scientists’ fault”—is partly true (they’re clearly not trained communicators, they’re not funded to do communication-yet it’s their job anyway) and partly a dodge (they could standardize baselines, and they could produce better public-facing tools; the will isn’t there). It’s “Not my fault, not my problem!” is the standard chorus I have heard for decades.

What Would Actually Fix It: Is a single public-facing dashboard, one baseline (1850–1900), one number per month, updated within a week of month-end, with all major datasets shown side by side. That’s technically trivial. Look how simple Zeke Hausfather’s Dashboard is and it uses the Paris argument baseline temperature.

But a globally backed authoritatively informed and climate science domain approved Dashboard covering all data application using a baseline temperature doesn’t exist because no institution has been tasked with building it, and the ones with the data are focused on their own publications.

The climate data infrastructure is fragmented in ways that serve institutions, not users. Whether that’s “incompetence” or just “academia being academia” is one of life’s mysteries that will not be solved anytime before hell freezes over.

The outcome is indistinguishable from sabotage, but the cause is incompetence. That’s a defensible observation about collective institutional failure of climate scientists and those who direct their activities and programs though funding across time and space.

If someone set out deliberately to build a system that:
Fragments the headline number across 5+ agencies with incompatible baselines
Buries the Paris-relevant figure (1850–1900) in paragraph 4 of a news article
Puts the actual data behind a CDS registration wall
Rewrites the “climate normal” every 10 years so the public number drifts
Publishes monthly bulletins in PDF-style web pages with no index
Lets each agency revise its own figures without a reconciliation table
Confuses the hell out of the media, politicians and the public, while being weaponized by motivated deniers
…they couldn’t do better than what exists. The fact that no one did design it that way, and it still came out this bad, is the damning part.

Rinse-repeat? :-)

“A recent doubling of global warming rate signals a 1.5 °C breach by 2028 … accurate projections of when global warming will exceed the Paris Agreement’s 1.5 °C threshold are essential for effective climate policy. Existing estimates place this exceedance in the early 2030s but carry substantial uncertainty.

“Here we analyze the latest observational temperature records through 2025 and identify a statistically significant doubling of the global warming rate during 2011–2025 compared to 1971–2025. Extrapolating this accelerated rate projects a crossing of the 1.5 °C threshold by 2028, nearly a decade earlier than previous estimates.”

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41612-026-01561-y

in Re to Piotr, 13 Oct 2026 at 8:10 PM,

https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2026/10/unforced-variations-oct-2026/#comment-851527

and 11 Oct 2026 at 6:34 PM,

https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2026/10/unforced-variations-oct-2026/#comment-851496

Hello Piotr,

Thank you for amending your questions that now read:

(13.10.) “What new insight would we get – if in our GCM, which already represents the “hydrology feedback, as well as various FORCINGS, we found that in your ARBITRARY projection showing, say 3C AGW in 2100, we “ explicitly quantified” that out of 3C:
– 0.9 C came from GHG increase itself and additional 1.8C from hydrology feedback amplifying that 0.9C warming,
– while the decrease in aerosol caused direct 0.1 C warming and additional 0.2C from hydrology feedback amplifying that 0.1C.”

and (11.10.)

“What new insight would we get – if in our GCM, which already represents the “hydrology, sea-ice, and surface albedo” feedbacks with T, we found that out ARBITRARY projection that showed, say, 3C AGW in 2100, we “ explicitly quantified” that out of this 3C AGW, say, 0.5C came from a the hydrology feedback? So what:
What would have CHANGED if out of the same 3C AGW – the hydrology feedback accounted for 2C instead of 0.5C??? Particularly, that nothing we could do about either, other than via reducing GHGs.”

It appears that you expect that two different simulations of Earth climate response to a standard perturbation, for two different land hydrological regimes, will give the same temperature response (3 °C in your example), wherein the attribution of the contributions of the forcing and particular feedbacks to this result may differ.

I admit that I do not know if such a knowledge could be practically useful, however, I would like to say that I also do not understand yet why you do expect such an outcome.

Contrary to you, I can imagine that both experiments could result in different temperature responses, and in such case, I would like to see if a drier land causes rather higher temperature response or rather a smaller temperature response in comparison with the wetter land.

In other words, why do you assume that the “hydrological feedback” (if you do understand thereby combination of lapse rate feedback, water vapour feedback and cloud feedback) should be the same for different hydrological regimes?
I would like to find out if this assumption is justified.

Greetings
Tomáš

P.S.
In my comment of 10 Oct 2026 at 6:46 PM,

https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2026/10/unforced-variations-oct-2026/#comment-851464

I said:
“As I have stated several times in our previous discussions, I accept that the results of Laguë et al. (2023) do not support the idea that increasing terrestrial evaporation would, by itself, provide a substantial reduction in global mean surface temperature (GMST).“

Why do you assign as a lie just the first row and not the whole sentence in its entirety?

As regards Sahara irrigation with desalinated water, it is my pleasure to admit that, particularly in view of the small magnitude of the direct cooling effect caused by the respective hydrological change (as showed by Ornstein et al (2009) and/by Lague et al.(2023)), it can hardly represent a feasible measure for global warming alleviation, at least unless it enables massive sequestration of atmospheric carbon dioxide by afforestation of the desert (as discussed by Ornstein et al.).

That is – WILL – not Won’t.

PS a note to emphasize that Hansen et al are not outliers here; and EEI is being used as an analysis tool rather than an alternative to GMST/SSTs warming measurement yardstick.

There is a large amount of research papers on the topic that mirrors Hansen’s research work on EEI Ceres Albedo Aerosol forcing Cloud feedback changes; Aerosol ERF; and the drivers for accelerating rates of warming “in the pipeline” etc.

For example
Recent reductions in aerosol emissions have increased Earth’s energy imbalance
Øivind Hodnebrog et al (2024)

We find good agreement between GCMs and CERES in terms of changes in outgoing SW fluxes and net downward fluxes over the stratocumulus-dominated eastern Pacific region (Fig. 4a; Supplementary Fig. 8), similar to Loeb, et al.10. Part of the large reduction in outgoing SW flux off the west coast of North America has been linked to reductions in low cloud cover following surface warming after 201410,23, and the models in our study do indeed show reduced total cloud fraction in this region, consistent with MODIS.

A main finding from our model results is that the forcing due to aerosol emission reductions has led to an approximate doubling of the trend in EEI over the 2001–2019 period (Fig. 1a, b). We find that the large positive trend in all-sky net downward SW flux, which drives the positive EEI trend, is due to approximately equal contributions from ERFaero and total radiative feedback. Our result showing a negligible impact on EEI of using an emission inventory that better accounts for the decline in Chinese aerosol emissions, illustrates that further research is needed to fully understand the impact of aerosols on EEI. While aerosol emission reductions are needed to improve air quality, they have added considerably to the amount of global warming we can expect without any further changes in forcing. This is likely partly responsible for the unprecedented rate of human-induced warming in the last decade2. Most future scenarios show rapid reductions of emissions of aerosols and their precursors25, and it is therefore likely that such emission reductions will continue to strengthen the Earth’s energy imbalance, on top of the greenhouse gas contribution.

Consequently, we may expect an accelerated surface temperature warming in this decade.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-024-01324-8

This decade being 2025-2035 I suspect, similar to others. Hansen references many related and confirming research in his papers. But readers would need to look for it to see it.

There’s still a ways to go: SOP “we still need more research”; such as

“These results demonstrate that new satellite observations can robustly and consistently constrain aerosol ERF uncertainty, while also identifying key processes where additional or complementary observations are required.”

How to cite: Bhatti, Y., Regayre, L., Jia, H., Watson-Parris, D., Im, U., Schutgens, N., Nenes, A., van Diedenhoven, B., Arifi, A., Fu, G., Wang, X., van Zadelhoff, G.-J., and Hasekamp, O.: New aerosol and cloud satellite observations from PACE and EarthCARE consistently constrain model uncertainties, EGU General Assembly 2026, Vienna, Austria, 3–8 May 2026, EGU26-14149, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu26-14149 , 2026.

Given historical precedence, I’m very doubtful this and similar research, including Hansen’s, won’t make it into CMIP7 nor the IPCC AR7 of 2029.

“Sauer’s (hes a philosopher) book The Invention of Good and Evil (2024) traces morality back five million years and reaches the opposite conclusion from the popular “humans are naturally hierarchical” story. Humans were “born to cooperate,” he argues — morality grew out of the need to cooperate under environmental pressure. Hierarchy isn’t the bedrock of human nature.”

“Sauer makes the point “hierarchy keeps coming back anyway.” Not because it’s built into us, but because the conditions that produce it keep coming back. You can topple an elite. A new dominant group will form around a new marker of status — a new kind of scarcity, a new kind of exclusivity. The classless society can’t be built and kept, not because people are naturally greedy, but because the structure of large-scale coordination keeps regenerating the same pattern.”

IMHO Sauer makes some good points, but he is confusing cooperation with being the opposite of hierarchy. Hierarchically organised group members still clearly cooperate. In fact its the hierarchy that enables them to cooperate rather than purely fight each other. Instead, the opposite of hierarchy is egalitarianism which is broadly where people are considered of equal status and group consensus dominates.

The experts on hierarchy such as evolutionary biologists, sociologists and anthropologists do not simplistically say we are fundamentally hierarchical. They say we have deep seated instincts towards both hierarchy AND egalitarianism (the opposite of hierarchy). We also have deep seated instincts towards cooperation AND competition.

What has really happened summarised by an AI:

The Ancestral Hierarchy Instinct (Dominance): Our closest primate relatives (like chimpanzees) operate on strict dominance hierarchies driven by physical force, threat, and resource control. Humans inherited these underlying neural mechanisms, which make status-seeking, territoriality, and ranking natural to us.

The Evolved Egalitarian Drive (Reverse Dominance Hierarchy): During human evolution, early hunter-gatherers developed lethal weapons (like spears) and symbolic language. This allowed lower-ranking individuals to coalition keep aggressive, dominant individuals in check. Egalitarianism became an active evolutionary adaptation—a system where the group actively suppresses alpha-like behavior.

Cultural Flip back to Hierarchy: With the agricultural revolution (~10,000 years ago), surplus food and private property enabled the re-emergence and scaling of extreme, formal hierarchies (chiefdoms, kingdoms, states).

My comment: Modern industrial society has flipped as well. It combines hierarchical structures AND egalitarian structures like democracy, because it works.

I agree to the extent that a society that has some hierarchical organisation in its structure will tend to over consume as a way of defining status. I think its very hard to solve this dilemma, and personally I think we may be stuck with it and it could lead to a collapse due to overuse of resources, but I strongly agree with MS it depends on what happens with population growth etc, etc. A collapse is possible but isnt locked in..

The thing is collapse sounds terrifying and dramatic – but when anthropologists use the term it just means a contraction. Japans economy collapsed in the 1980s and 1990s (about) but nobody starved and they maintained a high standard of living. Its since recovered to a large extent. A global collapse could me moderate and slow and something people adapt to. Or it could be rapid and very painful.

The thing is while renewables might just be delaying some future form of resource scarcity induced collapse, that delay is worth it, and buys us time and has the potential to reduce a whole range of problems. Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good (Voltaire).

Hierarchies and egalitarianism. Refer:

1. Christopher Boehm – Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior (1999)
2. Joseph Henrich & Francisco Gil-White – The Evolution of Prestige (2001)
3. David Graeber & David Wengrow – The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (2021)
4. Samuel Bowles & Herbert Gintis – A Cooperative Species: Human Reciprocity and Its Evolution (2011)

KM: 11 Oct “ Put plainly: Collapse isn’t a solution .”

Perhaps you should tell it to that KM fella who wrote the opposite:

KM 5 Sep : ” I’ve come to as simple realization and acceptance that the solution is collapse.”

How to say that “it isn’t” and at the same time plainly explain that “it is”. Stalin (1938) would have been proud of your dialectic.