IPCC: Have scientists failed to appreciate the consequences?

In their book The Collapse of Western Civilization, science historians Naomi Orseks and Eric Conway paint a bleak future picture of the weakness of governments in the face of climate change, which leads to the Great Crash of 2093. The authors predict the failure of attempts at environmental reform that could not stop the sequence of events, as they did not Knowledge turns into a powerful force, even though everyone knows what's going on.

The two American academics offer their reading of what will happen in the future, making 2023 the year of the "Eternal Summer", which will kill 500,000 people around the world. They predict that in the year 2040, droughts and heat waves will become commonplace everywhere, followed in the following year by a stronger heat wave that destroys crops and leads to massive migrations and disturbances as a result of food shortages.

Orsex and Conway's book, which was published in 2014. It is classified as a science fiction book, even if it is based on the scientific data available at the time. During the years that followed the publication of the book, the temperatures of the planet continued to rise, achieving unprecedented records. The years from 2014 to 2020 are the hottest since records began 142 years ago. The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency expects that the average temperature in 2021 will be close to what was recorded in the previous few years.

A Gap in Anticipating the Future

The summer of 2021 witnessed heat waves, floods and widespread fires in more than one place, as recent disasters showed that climate impacts can strike without regard to national borders, income levels, and political influence. In the United States, the Midwest was choked with smoke from wildfires hundreds of miles away in Canada. Germany also suffered billions of dollars in damages from the July floods that killed dozens.

Remarkably, the IPCC climate models failed to predict the severity of floods in Germany and the severity of the heat wave in North America. It is not yet possible to estimate whether regions such as Germany or North America will experience similar conditions every 20 years, 10 years, or even annually. The commission's reports often tend to be conservative and search for consensus among most policy opinions, and therefore the most extreme scenarios are marginalized.

It seems that the facts will impose themselves in the end, as the report of the authority, which was issued in August, indicates that the human influence on extreme weather phenomena has been “increased” since the last review by the authority in 2014, especially with regard to heat waves, heavy rains and droughts. and hurricanes.

The report also highlights a potential increase in complex extreme events, when one climate disaster causes and exacerbates another disaster. An example of this is what happened recently when the village of Leighton in the province of "British Columbia" set a temperature record in Canada at 49.5 degrees Celsius, and then followed the next day devastating bushfires.

The report notes that in the past, scientists have avoided explaining individual weather events with climate change, while there is now increased confidence to link the data and measure the impact of rising temperatures. This is evident after the heat wave in the northwest Pacific and Canada in late June, when a group of scientists found that human-caused climate change increased the chance of this wave at least 150 times.

The report states emphatically, for the first time in the IPCC's series of reports, that there is no residual scientific doubt that humans are 'fueling' climate change, this is 'unequivocal'. The report's authors say the only remaining uncertainty is whether the world will be able to muster the capabilities to stave off a future darker than the one we have imposed on ourselves.

The report indicates that atmospheric carbon dioxide has risen to levels not seen on the planet in two million years, oceans are turning acidic, sea levels have continued to rise, Arctic ice has continued to melt, and weather-related disasters have intensified, affecting large areas. all over the world.

The report, prepared by 234 authors, with the participation of thousands of researchers, is based on more than 14,000 studies, in addition to a set of new observational data from satellites and weather stations, which have given scientists more unprecedented details about what is happening on the planet.

Anticipating extreme events

Far from the certainty included in the report, there is growing concern about scientists' ability to estimate the consequences of climate change. The possibilities for the unknown area are becoming increasingly large, Zeke Hausfathr said, director of climate and energy at the Breakthrough Institute and a contributor to the report notes. We don't have any comparable reference cases in the last two million years or so. This makes predicting what will happen to Earth systems very difficult.”

The report corrects this gap, warning that at higher levels of warming it becomes more difficult to predict how the planet will respond, because sophisticated computer models become uncertain, and scientists cannot easily search for evidence in the real past time, because there is no time well recorded in human  real history when climate change has been It is very intense and happens more quickly, similar to what we are witnessing today. Warming above the 2°C threshold above pre-industrial levels also carries potential risks of accelerating climate change that are difficult to quantify.

As temperatures tatal rise, permafrost in the Arctic area will continue to melt, potentially releasing carbon gas that has been trapped in a deep freeze for thousands of years time. Trapped in the deep sea, methane can make its way into the atmosphere, and wildfires can turn millions of acres of carbon-rich forests into an additional source of greenhouse gases. Air quality in many places is expected to continue to deteriorate.

The ability of climate models to predict extreme events has come into question, after extreme weather events have swept the world over the past few years. A study conducted by researchers from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, on computer models to simulate the recent heat wave in North America and Europe, concluded that the possibility of such record phenomena is largely due to the speed with which the Earth’s temperature is rising, and not only to the degree the same temperature.

Gert Jan van Oldenburg, a researcher at the Royal Meteorological Institute who has successfully linked the recent North American heat wave to climate change, worries that some climate models have suggested that record temperatures cannot rise in the region. Peter Stott of the Met Office in Britain notes that older climate models did not predict the severity of some regional extremes, such as those recently recorded in Canada.

Scientists agree that reaching higher levels of accuracy in some climate models requires highly advanced computing. Improving the ability to process data will not only help in monitoring extreme weather events, but will also contribute to providing long-term climate forecasts. Some scientists are calling for an international coalition, similar to the particle physics organization CERN, on climate change, based on a giant computing project that could run about 200 million euros annually.

Fast continue Improving climate model graph is vital to adapt to climate globally change and inform early more warning systems to avoid deaths. But accurate climate models alone are not enough to turn knowledge into a powerful force for change in societies that find it difficult to imagine things that have not yet happened. Whatever the failures of the past or the prospects for the future, every measure to slow the pace of carbon emissions is an opportunity for more time to adapt to the changes to come, and every degree of warming that humans avoid contributes to stopping catastrophes that should not occur.