Tom, you're looking at this wrong to think this is all just about adding a few degrees to your local temperature, such as 3C global average rise means 3C warmer in your area, what's the big deal, sounds nice.
It's about the knock on effects those seemingly slight changes have on earth systems. Let me tell you not about what people predict might happen, but what already has happened to my area, and some of the earth system changes that have happened to cause that, and it's all been very bad.
The 1C rise so far, so tiny it seems, has led to the arctic melting. That reduction in albedo and open water has actually led to the arctic beginning to warm faster than just the 1C global average. Knock on effect one.
This has led to the knock on effect two of a radical change in the way the jet stream behaves, because the jet stream was driven by what used to be a sharp difference in temperature between the cold arctic air and the warmer mid latitude air. Now that this differential has been reduced, the jet stream has slowed, causing massive changes to the amplitudes in it's sine wave pattern. Those amplitude waves are also getting stuck in one place for longer than they used to. This has all amounted, already ... not in the future ... to drastic changes in how weather manifests in the middle latitudes. The first picture I've attached is a picture to demonstrate this change. This is knock on effect two.
What's that jet stream change has caused for my area in southern Alberta Canada, is that these huge amplitude jet stream ridges have been reaching high up toward the arctic during our winters for the past ten years, and getting stuck that way for months and months on and, and continued to happen year after year after year. This virtually eliminated the cold winter temperatures for our area. When these ridges form, which have been called ridiculously resilient ridges, we don't just change by a 1C global average temperature, we go from sub freezing temperatures that used to be the norm in our area, it means we change by 20C, or even 30C from what used to be the norm, virtually eliminating what used to be 'winter' under the old way that the jet stream used to behave. These patterns now 'lock' and stay this way for months. No more winter here.
We would call this 'weather' ... but it has been drastically changed by climate change altering the jet stream. And this is all just caused from the 1C global average change so far.
Knock on effect three, and I'll group a few things together here, has been what this elimination of winter has done to our local ecology that evolved to be stable under the 'old' jet stream behavior, and can't handle these changes to the jet stream. The plants all come out of the ground and trees start to form buds during these extended winter warm periods of 20C to 30C warmer 'weather.' Then they die when the buckled jet finally moves off and the cold swoops back in. They weren't adapted to swing back and forth in these extreme shifts. The animals that hibernate will come out of hibernation, thinking it is spring, and find they are out of step now with long evolved symbiotic systems, and there will be no berries for them to eat because it isn't actually spring yet. They die, or wander into human settlements looking for food, because they are starving. Then they get shot.
This loss of winter has also led to another incredibly massive knock on effect too ... the pine beetles that had evolved to die back over a cold winter, now no longer die over the winter. This has led to them expanding in a way they never used to, to the point where they have ravished the boreal forests of western Canada to the point where they have killed half the forests already since the 1990's. I'll put a picture of this happening up as picture two. Let's call this knock on effect three.
For knock on effect four, I'll talk about the wildfires that are erupt from having all this dead wood standing around that has been killed by the pine beetle changes (all caused through these knock on effects of climate change in just a 1C changed world so far.) There are wildfires burning 600 miles north of me right now, 1000 km away, and in picture three I'll show you what my area looks like right now because of this. It's awful, and extremely hazardous to people's health, especially the very young and the very old. This is smoke, for the third summer in a row now. The last two years this was how our entire August looked like. It's almost approaching unlivable to spend a solid month like this, in smoke, every summer. This would be knock on effect four in my local example.
All this earth system change from just a 1C global average rise so far. 20C to 30C changes for my area in winter, not from the global average rise, but because of how it has changed the arctic, which changed the jet stream, which changed the weather, which changed the pine beetle, which changed the fire activity.
See what it's about? Tacking 3C onto your nice sunny weather is not at all what it's about. It's about changes to the sensitive earth system that even small changes to the gloabal average temperature produce. Remember, it's only a few degrees C cooler and you trigger a whole ice age. These tiny changes produce massive changes to the earth systems, including 'weather.' Think ... Mississippi flooding. That's a stuck pattern. California drought, that's a stuck pattern. Hurricanes dumping a deluge on North Carolina from a stuck jet stream ridge in the North Atlantic when it was expected to have turned north. That's a jet stream change. Think extremelt abnormal heat in Scandinavian countries. Jet stream changes.
That's what you're missing. You're looking at it wrong. You need to expand your learning of the impacts of climate change. Not just what people say might happen, but what even now already [has] happened. It's much more drastic than the way you've framed it. It's about changes to the entire system from tiny global average temperature changes, not about tacking a few degrees onto your nice summer afternoon temperature.
