Are Emissions Worse Than We Think?
We’ve been severely underestimating the amount of methane released — so what else have we miscalculated?
If you’ve paid any attention at all to environmental issues, you’ve seen graphs like the one below. Like all good charts, they’re simple and tidy. They project an air of mathematical certainty about the future. You can take a quick peek at them and get a sense of the future that awaits us over the next three-quarters of a century:
Such charts tell us that if we keep doing what we’re doing, the world will experience 2.5–2.9 degrees of warming. If countries do everything they’ve promised to do, we will keep the planet a bit cooler, at 2.1 degrees above the baseline.
Charts like these are incredibly useful, and they’re the product of a lot of hard work by a lot of smart people. But they’re also the product of a great deal of guesswork. The modelers who make these predictions are dealing with a number of unreliable variables.
First, they’re modeling human behavior — how will consumers and corporations react to, say, a carbon tax? How quickly will people adopt new…
