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Thursday, July 23rd, 2020

Scientists Just Updated One of the Most Important Climate Metrics, and It’s Bad

Author:     Brian Kahn
Source:     Gizmodo
Publication Date:     22 July 2020
 Link: Scientists Just Updated One of the Most Important Climate Metrics, and It’s Bad
Stephan:   Another example of Schwartz' Law of Climate Change which says new research will always reveal that the effects will be worse than previously predicted, and they will occur sooner than previously predicted. In this case it is the rise of temperature. We may be consumed with the disastrous mismanagement by Trump of the Covid-19 pandemic, but beneath that like the threatening bass line in a movie sound track, is climate change, and this new study tells us it is happening faster than previously predicted, and it is going to be much worse than previously considered.
A Cal Fire firefighter battles the Camp Fire in 2018. Global warming makes deadly and destructive wildfires more likely.
Credit: Justin Sullivan (Getty

We know the planet is getting hot. Just how hot it will get is one of the biggest questions of the 21st century, tying up the fate of humanity and the biosphere in one neat hand basket to hell.

A 166-page study out today aims to help improve our understanding of how hot it will get by refining one of the most important metrics in climate science—what one researcher who worked on the paper dubbed the “holy grail” of research. The findings unfortunately show the best-case scenario is exceedingly unlikely, and heating will probably clock in on the higher end of previous estimates.

The metric scientists looked at in this massive paper, published Wednesday in Reviews of Geophysics, is something called climate sensitivity. It refers to how much the planet would heat up if we doubled the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere compared to pre-industrial levels. That sounds like a simple thing to solve for, […]

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1 Comment

  1. Maurene Morgan on Thursday, July 23, 2020 at 7:10 am

    You only have to look at what’s happening with the floods in China and the rest of Asia to see that dire consequences to climate change are happening now. It’s not just about fires in Oz or CA.