Why is the temperature *still* rising?

Question

2015 is the hottest year on record, and the average temperature continues to rise.

I don't understand why this continues, as (over the past twenty years) so much work was put into reducing Global Warming over the past 40 years, yet not only does the temperature not fall, it continues to rise more than it did between 1870-1960.

I don't understand something. The amount of industry went through the roof (literally) between 1870 to 1960, and no one cared about the environment

Now that we do care about it, and (at least somewhat) legislate cleaner cars, factories, etc, I would expect the temperature to even out, yet it doesn't

Why not?

Answer 1

"So much work"? Actually, compared to the global rate of greenhouse gas emissions, it's a case of "so little work"! From a scientific perspective the 'economists' solution' of carbon trading was always unlikely to achieve the required carbon cuts, as has been verified by their ineffectiveness over the last decade or so. As farrenthorpe points out, the rate of increase of CO₂ is largely population-driven, and hence there is still an inexorable rise in mean atmospheric CO₂. The acid test of human efforts to limit global warming is whether the Hawaiian CO₂ monitoring graph is flattening off:

It clearly isn't going to flatten anytime soon. In fact, if anything, it is getting steeper. So all the hot air from 'Paris', and previous talkfests, is evidently too little, too late. Realistically, limiting the average temperature rise to less than 2 °C, is now effectively unattainable. We have yet to see what 'all this work' can achieve. So far, almost nothing.

Answer 2

Your premises are flawed due to the lack of two critical details:

1. Population rise; the sheer number of people on the planet that are consuming resources has risen to 7 billion people.
2. Standard of Living; a greater percentage of people in the world live a "Western" style, which consumes more goods per capita.

You should study something like the Global Carbon Project to gain a greater perspective on carbon and climate.

Answer 3

In addition to other answers:

1. the oceans have been acting as a sort of heat capacitor, according to climatehotmap.org the oceans took 20 times more heat than the atmosphere, this will increase the global warming over the next decade due to heat being discharged from the ocean
2. rising temperatures melt the permafrost which releases methane, an even more potent greenhouse gas than CO₂ which results in a sort of "permafrost carbon feedback loop" where rising temperatures release more gasses leading to more rising temperatures
3. sea level rise and shrinking polar caps increase the total amount of Earth's dark surfaces resulting in less energy being reflected back into space, meaning more heat on Earth, greenfacts.org

So, basically, there's a couple of hypothesized feedback loops that start happening when the planet heats up which in turn make the planet heat up more, see the Wikipedia article for more information,

according to some sources we are either rapidly approaching (or maybe even there) on the point of no return when the positive feedback loops result in a greenhouse effect that will continue to grow even if all fossil fuel burning would come to an end in one day (Scientific American, NASA, a bunch of resources on Wikipedia including UN and :cough: Rolling Stone :cough: and others...)

There's actually a growing body of evidence that water worlds are rare and fragile due to the aforementioned feedback loops and that we might be capable of turning Earth into a kind of hot hell similar to Venus by causing an unstoppable chain reaction.

Answer 4

There is another factor not yet mentioned contributing to the effect you notice: global warming is related to the total cumulative amount of CO₂ in the atmosphere, not to what we are emitting in this instance. The atmospheric lifetime of CO₂ is estimated to be of the order of 30–95 years, i.e. if we stop emitting now the warming will continue into the future before reaching a peak and declining.

If you look at the Mauna Loa graph in Gordon's answer: the warming in year X is not related to the Y-value for X, but to the total area under the graph to year X.

Quoting from e.g. the PDF Cumulative Carbon and Just Allocation of the Global Carbon Commons:

Recent research has shown that the magnitude of climate change, as measured by global mean warming, is very well characterized by a simple metric known as cumulative carbon. Cumulative carbon is simply the net carbon emitted globally over the period of time during which human activities continue to contribute a net input of carbon (as CO₂) to the Earth system – more or less the duration of the fossil fuel era. The key results regarding cumulative carbon are as follows:
• The global mean warming is linearly proportional to cumulative carbon.
• The amount of warming at the time emissions cease is nearly independant of the emissions trajectory over which the cumulative carbon is emitted.
• The amount of warming at the time emissions cease persists for about a thousand years, and declines only very gradually over the next ten thousand years, and still more slowly over the following several hundred thousand years.

and

Other significant greenhouse gases, notably methane, also contribute to global warming, but these do not merit consideration on an equal footing with CO₂ because their persistence in the atmosphere is so short. For example, methane has an atmospheric lifetime of only 12 year, so that we can delay methane controls for two centuries if we wish, and still get the full benefit of reduction of methane emissions within a few decades of implementation of controls. The same cannot be said for CO₂, as we shall see shortly.

BTW The methane disappears by oxidation, with one of the reaction products being .... CO₂ again.