All climate change models show that disaster is approaching rapidly. But why?

There are dozens of climate models, according to which warming due to climate change on our planet will lead to an increase in temperature by 3 ° C. 

It is important to understand that this is a catastrophic forecast. At first glance, a slight increase in temperature will lead to flooded cities, disruptions in agriculture and deadly heat. At the same time, in almost all complex climate models, gloomy stability is observed, which lasted until the last year. So, slowly and imperceptibly, some models began to show a significant increase in temperature. Scientists who honed these systems used the same assumptions about greenhouse gas emissions as before, but this time the results were much worse. Some models predict a temperature increase of at least 5 ° C.

Scenario of impending disaster

According to Bloomberg, researchers have begun collecting data, but this process will take several months at best. The reason for concern is that these same models have successfully predicted climate change for half a century. The results obtained are still consistent with all the main scientific, political and private climate goals and discussions, including the sixth encyclopedic assessment of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which will be published in 2021. So far, the situation is such that if humanity does not take any action on climate change, we will have less time to avoid the worst consequences.

Nevertheless, some researchers are convinced that there is a high probability that the models show incorrect results or they were incorrectly decrypted. Uncertainty about how to read models highlights one of the central issues of climate change. On the one hand, politicians and members of the public are turning to scientists to learn how to prevent devastating droughts, heatwaves and warm winters. However, there is no single answer to the question of how soon these or those changes will occur. Using climate models, researchers test ideas about the effects of melting ice cover, soil and cloud moisture, and other factors. There are currently over a hundred models used to predict the relationship between carbon dioxide and warming,

A gap created by running water at the edge of the Aletsch Glacier, near Bettmeralp, Switzerland

Creating climate models that perform extremely complex calculations takes a huge amount of time. It is necessary to take into account a large amount of data that interact with each other and to make corrections in the early stages for troubleshooting. All existing climate models do not take into account permafrost thawing. And this, as you can guess, is a big problem. Last year, models that are used at major climatological institutes in the world began to show unusual data. The cause of what is happening remains unknown.

Hot models

In general, up to one fifth of the new results published last year showed an abnormally high sensitivity to climate. However, in order to say with certainty whether all these gloomy forecasts are valid, more research is needed.

Climate models predict a very hot future

If consensus is still reached on new higher scores, this could have a real impact on the actions of governments and enterprises around the world. Recall that the 2015 Paris Agreement requires countries to reduce emissions of harmful substances into the atmosphere so that the global temperature does not rise above 1.5 ° C. But the schedule by which the world agreed to act in the name of this goal was partly made up of the same climate models that currently give higher ratings. And this may mean that the goal stipulated by the Paris Agreement is already unattainable.

Today, the challenge facing researchers is to find out what results such changes in climate models can lead to. In the next, researchers who are working on creating climate models and authors of UN reports on climate change will try to get a general picture that we will not know about before 2021.