Climate scientists have consistently underestimated climate change and continue to do so.
Climate models have been and remain simplistically pathetic. Climatologists still don’t understand the dynamics behind climate change.
For example, an eruptive aspect lying dormant in climate models is volcanism.
At least 25 times the water in the world’s oceans flows through Earth’s mantle. Warm water expands. Increased water pressure in the mantle stimulates volcanism. Already volcanos around the world are more active than they were 20 years ago.
The climatic effect that volcanoes have depends upon over all climate trend. Going into hothouse, as the world is now, volcanism accelerates warming, despite spewing aerosols which would nominally have a cooling effect.
No extant climate model incorporates volcanic activity.
Nor do climate models sufficiently incorporate feedback loops. Hence, for instance, continuing surprise at the rate of ice melt in the polar regions.
Climate forecasts have been made by overconfident pussyfooters who were too timid to buck consensual opinion. In the mid-20th century, environmental scientists thought that climate was glacial in its pace of change. Through the 1980s, the consensus was that climate change took millennia.
Even now, scientists underestimate the rapidity of climate change, despite copious data from geological sources and recent observations, including the accelerating contribution of man-made pollution. This year, for instance, climate scientists were stunned to discover the extent and pace of polar ice melt.
Owing to incompetent scientists, economists have grossly underestimated the economic toll that climate calamities and mass extinction have already taken and will take in the coming decades.
Politicians worldwide have yet to act responsibly: partly because of their own stupidity and small-mindedness, and partly because they aren’t being pushed by their ill-informed constituents (“leadership” being a hollow word politically).
India is on the cusp of suffering a localized mass extinction of its human population. Yet India’s politicians persist with their provincial pettiness.
In the early 2020s the world will slide into a recession from which it will never recover to the level of vitality and employment enjoyed during the 1990s, because loss of confidence in the future will warp and stymie investment. Today’s political tensions will seem minor-league compared to what they will become, as the forces of status-quo conservatism (backed by gullible blockheads and bankrolled by the rich) square off against sensibility.
By 2070 global average air surface temperature will be at least 2.2 °C higher than it was in 1770, global sea level will more than a meter above what it was in 1870, and the human population worldwide will be less than it was in 1970 (3.7 billion). Human suffering will intensify correspondent to climate mishap. Numerically, roughly half the people on the planet now (7.7 billion) will be slain via various catastrophes from climatic turmoil by 2070. The foregoing is a conservative forecast.
Without unimaginable changes in societal organization, world civilization will collapse by 2070 – both through climate change and the conflicts it inspires. In a world reliant upon international trade and with fragile infrastructures, disintegration is much easier than almost everyone seems to appreciate.
References:
Ishi Nobu, Spokes 6: The Fruits of Civilization, BookBaby (2019).
Ishi Nobu, Our Imminent Demise podcast show (October 2019).
Ishi Nobu, Environment category blog entries.
Eugene Linden, “How scientists got climate change so wrong,” The New York Times (8 November 2019).
Naomi Oreskes et al, “Scientists have been underestimating the pace of climate change,” Scientific American (19 August 2019).
Volcano Discovery web site.