Gavin Schmidt, boss of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Science, is not noted for his humility
Nevertheless, writing in Nature, a journal, in March 2024, he confessed to being humbled by his inability, and that of his colleagues, to understand the extraordinary 12 months through which they had just lived.
The year 2023 had been around 0.2°C (0.4°F) hotter than had been expected.
Not just humbled: worried, too.
If climate modellers’ accumulated knowledge and spiffy models could not explain what had just happened, it might mean that climate change had pushed the workings of Earth into “uncharted territory…fundamentally altering how the climate system operates”.
Both the speed of climate change and the workings of the climate might be changing.
The future might look even worse than it used to.
But the case is still not closed.
In the next few weeks he expects modellers at GISS and elsewhere to start trying to pull them all together into a coherent narrative in new climate-model runs that use the most up-to-date data on both sulphur emissions and the reduction in reflected light.
Picking over the results may allow scientists to say with some certainty what actually happened.
The Economist 16 December 2024
Kommentarer