Climate change: Experts stress the importance of not making climate projections look worse than they currently are.
Something funny happened when, three years ago, climate scientists started reporting results from their latest generation of Earth models. Some related of them show faster heating.
These “hot patterns” quickly raised the alarm. According to a commentary published in Nature by today’s top five scientists, it’s a puzzle being solved. Advances including a better understanding of the physics of clouds have had the unintended effect of increasing overall temperatures faster in some models.
With the effects of climate change visible almost weekly, governments, companies, investors and communities are all hungry for high-quality information on what’s to come. The treatment of hot models is a big part of that, and the authors just state how to dig up what’s useful about them.
Climate models are complex research papers that for decades have, for the most part, predicted how temperatures will rise due to continued greenhouse gas pollution – “the best window into the future world future that climate scientists have,” said Richard Betts, head of climate research at the UK Met Office, who was not involved in the new paper. They are driven by the physics of how carbon dioxide and other gases absorb heat, how much light is reflected by ice sheets into space, and countless other phenomena that generations of scientists have observed in the past. the real world.
When physics can’t fully capture natural processes, modelers estimate how the world works — and that’s where the headache in the latest model updates probably came. out. These models, which form the backbone of the United Nations’ latest climate assessment, which began publication in August, include more sophisticated views of the science of ice, water and clouds that appear to have pushed the envelope. than the answers of some models to the central question of how much CO₂ causes how much warming.
The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change took the burning modeling issue seriously in its latest round of reports and ended what scientists call “democracy”. model” or treat all research models as equal to all others. Hot models received less attention, and IPCC added another layer of analysis later.
Despite the IPCC’s recent work, the Nature authors worry that in the years to come, no one is up to the task of encouraging best practices to prevent hot patterns from appearing in research, where they could be indicates that the warming is more than what happened. They emphasize that what is expected from climate change is bad enough, and as governments and companies increasingly scrutinize what climate projections mean specifically to them, science The most accurate learning becomes more important than ever.
Overall, the output of the latest models “is a wealth of data that will then be used by companies, local governments, local policymakers for adaptation and planning purposes.” ,” said Zeke Hausfather, an author and lead climate research team at Stripe. “The last thing we want to do is tell people we’re going to have a hotter crowd than we can afford.”
The first recommendation on much of the technique in the Nature paper concerns hot models that are very useful beyond the pages of scientific journals. That’s starting to think about climate change more in terms of warming than we might experience during the year. While the rate of warming, which is at the heart of the heating models, is not a key factor in the new study and is particularly relevant with regard to risk, the models are still useful, says Betts. provide the most complete information on potential impacts and adaptation needs. ”
Climate change is inherently full of surprises, making timelines — what will happen in 2030, in 2050, in 2100 — less reliable than understanding each day’s increase in temperature. What does more undesirable mean — 1.5°C, 2°C, 3°C.
“The takeaway is, well, what is the optimal time to reach a temperature of 2°? It never, right? Don’t do it,” said Kate Marvel, a paper co-author and a research scientist at Columbia University and NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies.
