The predicament of climate scientists on the road to a super tropical Earth

THURSDAY, JULY 11, 2024
by Andrew Glikson

As temperatures in large parts of the Earth are soaring (cf. 52.3°C in Delhi, flames engulf large regions in California, tornadoes ravage the Gulf of Mexico states, severe drought starve populations in southern Africa and climate extremes continue to taking over large parts of the Earth...But while climate change has become more than evident, there is a heavy price to be paid by those who try to alert the public.





Figure 3. A prolonged dry spell in southern Africa in early 2024 scorched crops and threatened food security for millions of people.

A number of prominent climate scientists representing the scientific consensus on climate change, as documented by the IPCC, have tried their best to convey the message in public forums, but were mostly shunned by conservative media. At the same time many climate scientists tend to regard the IPCC-based climate consensus as too optimistic. An article titled When the End of Human Civilization Is Your Day Job (Richardson, 2015) states … “Among many climate scientists, gloom has set in. Things are worse than we think, but they can’t really talk about it … Climate scientists have been so distracted and intimidated by the relentless campaign against them that they tend to avoid any statements that might get them labelled “alarmists”, instead retreating into a world of charts and data.“

As stated by Noam Chomsky: “It’s interesting that these public climate debates leave out almost entirely a third part of the debate, namely a very substantial number of scientists, competent scientists, who think that the scientific consensus is much too optimistic. A group of scientists at MIT came out with a report about a year ago describing what they called the most comprehensive modelling of the climate that had ever been done. Their conclusion, which was unreported in public media as far as I know, was that the major scientific consensus of the international commission is just way off, it’s much too optimistic … their own conclusion was that unless we terminate use of fossil fuels almost immediately, it’s finished. We’ll never be able to overcome the consequences. That’s avoided in the debate.”

Antarctica is losing ice at an average rate of more than 150 billion tons per year, and Greenland is losing more than 270 billion tons per year, adding to sea level rise. Some glaciologists and Arctic scientists consider the accelerated rate of glacial melt in Greenland and West Antarctica may result in little remaining ice over these terrains toward the end of the century, leading to sea level rise on the scale of many meters, with catastrophic consequences for coastal and river valley population centres.

https://arctic-news.blogspot.com/2024/07/the-predicament-of-climate-scientists-on-the-road-to-a-super-tropical-earth.html