Climate
Worst Case most likely

Study: The Worst-Case Climate Predictions Are the Most Accurate Ones.

Burgess COMMENTARY

Peter Burgess

Study: The Worst-Case Climate Predictions Are the Most Accurate Ones.

In the 1970s, scientific consensus increasingly acknowledged that global warming was a clear and present danger if greenhouse gases were not curtailed.

Since that time, “the year 2100” has been humanity’s selfish delusion that you can push catastrophic climate change to your children and grandchildren to fix. If we had taken incremental steps over the decades, as President Jimmy Carter had argued, we may very well have solved the crisis for ourselves and future generations. But we didn’t and, summer is coming. Eric holthaus of Pacific Standard, repeats the warning; “Without urgent attention and transformative climate action at the local, state, national, and international levels, America's climate problem will begin to exact an ever-greater toll on our economy and our selves”.

Incrementalism will not work now. We now need to throw everything we have at the global warming problem. I am not convinced that we will do that. It’s not all our fault that we did not act as fossil fuel industries and their political supporters “have seized on the uncertainty inherent in climate models as reasons to doubt the dangers of climate change, or to argue against strong policy and mitigation responses”.

MIT Technology Review writes on a study based on satellite observations where it concludes that “temperatures could rise nearly 5 °C by the end of the century”. The Paris Climate Accord set the goal of 1.5 °C by 2100.

The paper, published on Wednesday in Nature, found that global temperatures could rise nearly 5 °C by the end of the century under the the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s steepest prediction for greenhouse-gas concentrations. That’s 15 percent hotter than the previous estimate. The odds that temperatures will increase more than 4 degrees by 2100 in this so-called “business as usual” scenario increased from 62 percent to 93 percent, according to the new analysis.

Climate models are sophisticated software simulations that assess how the climate reacts to various influences. For this study, the scientists collected more than a decade’s worth of satellite observations concerning the amount of sunlight reflected back into space by things like clouds, snow, and ice; how much infrared radiation is escaping from Earth; and the net balance between the amount of energy entering and leaving the atmosphere. Then the researchers compared that “top-of-atmosphere” data with the results of earlier climate models to determine which ones most accurately predicted what the satellites actually observed. snip

The simulations that turned out to most closely match real-world observations of how energy flows in and out of the climate system were the ones that predicted the most warming this century. In particular, the study found, the models projecting that clouds will allow in more radiation over time, possibly because of decreased coverage or reflectivity, “are the ones that simulate the recent past the best,” says Patrick Brown, a postdoctoral research scientist at the Carnegie Institution and lead author of the study. This cloud feedback phenomenon remains one of the greatest areas of uncertainty in climate modeling.

“There are problems with climate models, but the ones that are most accurate are the ones that produce the most warming in the future.”

In fact, the new paper is the latest in a growing series that project larger impacts than previously predicted or conclude that climate change is unfolding faster than once believed. This video is from NASA in 2014.

Roughly every six years, the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) enlists hundreds of climate scientists worldwide in producing assessment reports. IPCC report authors rigorously evaluate the latest results from climate models run on supercomputers. Internationally, a few dozen modeling groups—including NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies—contributed projections of 21st century climate to the current IPCC Fifth Assessment Report. The models simulated how Earth might respond to different scenarios of greenhouse gas emissions and reduction measures. Watch the video to see how global temperatures respond to the “business as usual” scenario, where carbon dioxide concentrations rise to 936 parts per million—more than double today's levels of 400 parts per million—by the year 2100.

The 936 PPM CO2 NASA Model Prediction 1,809 views

https://youtu.be/r1yQQRXp2Xs



Climate State Published on Nov 21, 2017 SUBSCRIBE 17K SUBSCRIBE SUBSCRIBED UNSUBSCRIBE This NASA visualization is based on the latest IPCC report, and uses the business as usual scenario, where carbon dioxide concentrations rise to 936 parts per million—more than double today's levels of 400 parts per million—by the year 2100. Temperature anomalies are estimated to be close to 4°C in the Arctic. https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/det... Music http://TitanSlayer.com SHOW MORE 10 Comments SORT BY