An impressive data fit. It's a bummer we don't have data going even older - the medieval warm period was between 950 to 1250. It would be an interesting comparison point.
Does it even matter anymore? Someone always trying to play devils advocate - the science is clear. The anecdotes are clear. We all know what’s happening. We are warming up and it’s our fault. It’s really simple.
This part is simple, yes: it's warming and it's done by us. I'm a lot less clear on how this is bad.
> This summer is what a 1.2°C-heated planet looks like. But in the future this won’t seem so bad — compared to the 1.5°C-heated planet. If we get to 2°C …
The suspension points are there because trying to put actual words won't be as scary. A literal option would be "... we'll have summers an average 0.8C hotter". Which somehow fails to make me tremble in my boots, especially since it also means we'll have winters 0.8C warmer, which is a very very good thing.
> The suspension points are there because trying to put actual words won't be as scary.
I live in Spain. This summer is being absolutely unbearable. We're constantly hovering around 40ºC. You can't open the windows to go to sleep because at 23:00 it's still 29-30º outside. We've been like this since the beginning of July. And I live in Madrid, which isn't even one of the hottest parts of the country.
And that's just now. I can't imagine how it's going to be in the future. It's going to make parts of the country completely unlivable in the summer. Insulating and protecting from extreme heat is far more difficult from extreme cold, at this point the only alternative we really have is AC, which makes things worse due to the energy usage, and there are zones that aren't equipped with it because they don't usually get a lot of heat. Quite a lot of people will die of heat stroke (those vulnerable to hypothermia in the winter are also vulnerable to heat stroke in the summer, it's not like warmer weather will save any lives). The effect on crops, vegetation and wildlife is going to be devastating. The desertification process of Spain will continue even faster.
So yeah, the prospect of 2ºC heating is really, really scary.
As far as I understand, the medieval warm period is believed to be an anomaly localized to Europe. So it may not be reflected in data specific to Japan.
