Bad News — The World is Getting Even Hotter Than We Thought
Researchers forecast higher chance of more warming in new climate models
Global warming has always been incredibly difficult to model. Since the 1970s, scientists have predicted that a doubling of atmospheric CO2 would lead to a temperature increase of 1.5–4.5 degrees Celsius over pre-industrial levels. Since then, many researchers have attempted to revise this estimate, but it has been extremely difficult to shrink this range.
This week, our models got a little bit better…but not in a good way. Researchers now predict that a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide is very likely to lead to 2.3–4.7 °C warming. That may seem like a minor adjustment, but it has massive implications.
Why does this matter?
Imagine a doctor said that if you maintained your current diet you were going to gain between 15–45 lbs in the next year. That is a really wide range! 45 lbs sounds really bad, but 15 lbs isn’t terrible. A couple months later, you go back to the doctor and they revise their estimate to 23–47 lbs. That range is still large, but our best-case scenario is much worse. Now we need to make even larger diet adjustments to avoid substantial weight gain. In the case of climate change, a revised range of 2.3–4.7 °C…
