The year it got (really) hot- Gwynne Dyer  OPINION: This year (That’s because we are now entering El Niño, the part of a seven-yearly oceanic cycle that heaps extra heat on whatever is already occurring.El Niño is not part of climate change, but in 2024 it will get piled on top of a lot of climate warming that has happened over the past seven years, so it’s certain to break all previous records. The question is by how much. Jim Hansen says a lot. “The 1.5 degree limit is deader than a doornail,” Hansen told me last month, “and the scenarios you would need to stay under two degrees are just imaginary.”‘No more than 1.5°C’ was the limit we were told to aim for to avoid big jumps in the average global temperature. ‘Never more than 2.0°C’ was the absolute limit, because after that ‘runaway’ would become likely. Both gone, he says. The world crossed the threshold into +1.2° about two years ago, and the general assumption was that we would stay in that zone for at least the next five years. But 2023 ended up at around +1.4°, with huge wildfires, massive floods and storms, killer heat waves – and Hansen says 2024, with the El Niño boost, will be much worse. “I argue that within the next year or two (2024-25) we will go up to 1.6°, 1.7°C warming. Then after the El Niño finishes, it will drop back – but it’s not going to drop all the way back to 1.2°. “It may go down to 1.4° or so, but because the planet is so far out of equilibrium it’s not going to drop much. So we’re already at sort of the 1.5° warming limit, and we’ve got plus two degrees C in the pipeline by some time in the middle to late 2030s is my estimate.” On the other hand, all scientists get things wrong on the way to getting them right – that’s how science works – and Hansen is challenging an official scientific consensus, embodied in the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), that has endured for around 15 years now. That doesn’t mean he’s wrong, but it also doesn’t mean he’s right. In this particular case, it would be comforting if Hansen turned out to be wrong, because the implications of his being right are pretty horrific. The man leading the charge against Hansen is Michael Mann, a scientist of comparable stature who had a significant role in creating the current consensus. That is, the consensus that says we still have a chance of staying below +1.5°C until 2035, and could conceivably still be there when we arrive at ‘net zero emissions’ in 2050......read on     https://www.stuff.co.nz/opinion/301033365/2024-the-year-it-got-really-hot