Droppin’ Climate Science
Dr. John Holdren, former Science Officer to the Obama Administration, has the distinction of making the former president chuckle— in a dark way.
Nearly fifteen years ago, Holdren mentioned that 60–65% of Americans understood that climate change is real and that humans have something to with it (in contrast to the 50% who believed evolution is a fact.)
“The President laughed and said ‘that’s no consolation,’” Holdren said.
The problem of climate collapse now ranks among our top existential concerns. A 2017 study shows that 39.6% of Americans said climate change, “unchecked,” would lead to “very serious” problems.
We generally have risk aversion hard-wired into us, thus the reason Americans will buy insurance on as little as a 1% risk. And yet for many reasons, climate change tends to flummox our cognitive capacities. Stephen Schneider, the “Carl Sagan of climatology,” expressed his own frustration about the colossal challenges of climate modeling and forecasting. “Here we’re talking about 50% risk to the planetary life support system and they’re telling us that’s not certain enough,” he said.
Few other known problems can be compared. Not only that, but the impacts of climate change take place across various time signatures. While some changes unfurl over the abstractness of geologic time, other consequences manifest faster. Now we might see a rapid insect die-off or a sudden absence of a migrating flock between one generation and the next.
Climatology, with its inherent uncertainty and probabilistic modeling, has been sadly misunderstood. Accurate climate modeling takes years of synthesizing data from meteorology, fluid dynamics, physics, biology, and chemistry.
Keep Calm and Carry On
Whether the 45th presidential administration will commit to participate in the IPCC remains to be seen. Meanwhile, scientific research in the States doggedly persists and improves. What else to do with such a high degree of uncertainty and a colossal cost of delay?
“It’s a big juicy problem, which, of course, is one of the things that has attracted many scientists to work on it,” says Dr. Holdren. “Scientists, for the most part, like to work on things that are interesting and challenging, but also have some bearing on societal well-being.”
For instance, Dr. William Collins, lead author of IPCC Assessment #5 (written in 2014) and Director for the Climate and Ecosystem Sciences Division at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, reports that scientists prepare for the next IPCC Assessment #6 (due out in 2020) with a powerful suite of models that will give a degree of detail down to the level of zip codes.
Powerful climate modeling also shows that sea levels could rise as much as three feet by the year 2050. As the seas will rise, the IPCC will continue working on the arduous, painstaking process of writing long-range projection reports that go through two rounds of reviews with up to a thousand review comments on each chapter, and that take three years to write.
In light of these realities, the window to debate or believe in climate change shut decades ago. Each of us has a part to play in solving this “big juicy problem.” Some can begin by eschewing their denial.
