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Several decades ago, the rulers of our society chose to begin a massive project, essentially conducting a unique scientific experiment with potentially foreseen but possibly unpredictable outcomes.
They decided to go all out in: (1) extracting fuels buried deep in the Earth, energy from the sun stored via photosynthesis and animal metabolism over a span of 500 million years as coal, oil, and gas; and (2) burning all this fuel they could find in the brief period of a few decades.
Our rulers were warned by scientists that their project involved serious risk, but they figured the power they could gain and the money they could make was worth any cost. They didn't care about the negative consequences, and/or foolishly believed that imaginary future technologies would somehow be able to fix whatever problems their actions caused.
And now, guess what — we're seeing signs that this experiment might be out of control. Feedback loops are kicking in, causing "natural" emissions which could trigger cascading effects, breaking down the ecosystem. It also appears that Earth's climate is more sensitive to greenhouse gases than first believed. Yet our rulers *still* continue to recklessly burn fossil fuels, always drilling and fracking for more, hungry for power and compelled by greed.
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Uh-oh. There’s a funny thing about that insane experiment being conducted by our rulers.
Although many scientists have done their best to warn what could happen if such reckless burning of fossil fuels didn’t stop, it turns out now that those scientists might not have fully understood all that was happening.
It seems their models were not good enough. The problem, you see, is even more difficult than they realized…
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Fifty years into the project of modeling Earth’s future climate, we still don’t really know what’s coming. Some places are warming with more ferocity than expected. Extreme events are taking scientists by surprise.
Right now, as the bald reality of climate change bears down on human life, scientists are seeing more clearly the limits of our ability to predict the exact future we face. The coming decades may be far worse, and far weirder, than the best models anticipated.
Some variables are missing from climate models entirely. Trees and land are major sinks for carbon emissions, and that this fact might change is not accounted for in climate models. But it is changing: Trees and land absorbed much less carbon than normal in 2023, according to research published last October. In Finland, forests have stopped absorbing the majority of the carbon they once did, and recently became a net source of emissions.
The interactions of the ice sheets with the oceans are also largely missing from models, despite the fact that melting ice could change ocean temperatures which could have significant knock-on effects. Changing ocean-temperature patterns are currently making climate modelers at NOAA rethink their models of El Niño and La Niña; the agency initially predicted that La Niña’s cooling powers would kick in much sooner than it now appears they will.
While models struggle to capture the world we live in now, the planet is growing more alien to us, further from our reference ranges, as the climate keeps changing. If given unlimited time, science could probably develop models that more fully captured what we’re watching play out. But by then it would be too late to do anything about it.
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The above is just a few excerpts from a long and very informative article. I suggest reading the whole thing.
FULL ARTICLE -- https://archive.ph/sl6bA
"it turns out now that those scientists might not have fully understood all that was happening"
Let's be clear. Scientists knew all along that their models were imperfect and could not understand or predict "all that was happening".
But models could predict that bad things would happen, likely to get worse, and quite possibly in ways not yet foreseen.
Scientists have been banging on not only about known risks but also vast areas of unknown risk.
If anyone had listened.
Thank you.
It irks me that climate scientists are shot for being the messenger, that denialists - and denialists-lite - are disparaging them in order to sow doubt on the climate science, that jargon like "error bar" and "uncertainty" gets taken out of context and used against them, and on and on.
All while the problem is that the fossil fuel industry wants to keep making profit off the destruction of our atmosphere and oceans.
@CelloMomOnCars @regordane @breadandcircuses Climate Scientists: Something bad is coming. We know for a fact how to stop it.
Politicians: Nah, we’re fine as we are.
REALLY BAD THINGS HAPPEN
Politicians: why did you not specifically mention Hollywood was at risk?
Climate Scientists: We know for a fact how to stop this, so please stop.
Politicians: nah, now it’s your fault so we are fine as we are. Who wants to rebuild in plastics and concrete?
@Homestead @regordane @breadandcircuses
What irks me *double* is when "friendly fire" people do that to climate scientists, most without understanding the situation. Like the models' scale.
And NO, the IPCC does not "soft-pedal" the climate crisis, just go in a read the reports. BUT The IPCC's executive summary is crafted by nations' representatives: they are the ones who tone down the language and take out statements that are harmful to oil and gas interests. There are many other examples.