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I wasn’t worried about climate change. Now I am.
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I wasn’t worried about climate change. Now I am.

Sabine Hossenfelder
Sabine Hossenfelder, 2024
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What if the models most climate scientists are using to make predictions are wrong and global temperatures are actually rising much more quickly than expected? Physicist Sabine Hossenfelder explains why confusion about one metric, climate sensitivity, is creating two dueling timelines regarding climate change. Humanity would be wise to consider the possibility, warns Hossenfelder, that there’s less time to offset the impacts of climate change than previously imagined, and to respond accordingly.

Summary

Global temperatures could rise twice as quickly as predicted.

2023 went down in history as having the hottest recorded temperatures since the mid-19th century. That same year, antarctic sea ice also hit a record low, while people around the world experienced longer and hotter heat waves than in previous years. But far from being an outlier, it’s possible this is a harbinger of what’s to come as climate change’s effects rapidly accelerate.

Scientists are struggling to agree on one crucial number: equilibrium climate sensitivity (ECS), or just climate sensitivity for short. Climate sensitivity is a metric used to generate prediction models of how fast global temperatures will rise if carbon dioxide (CO2) levels continue rising at their current rate. Until 2019, climate models — collected in a World Climate Research Program project...

About the Speaker

Sabine Hossenfelder is a science communicator with a PhD in physics. She is the author of the books Existential Physics: A Scientist’s Guide to Life’s Biggest Questions and Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray.

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