Science is never really settled, even when you think it is. Even when you are certain the sky is falling and it must be true that the climate is going to kill us, you get another report saying hold on, we need to make a couple changes to that prediction. And as soon as you digest that, and re-calibrate your models, then another report comes out saying actually, wait, it might be worse than we figured the first time.
Study finds Arctic warming three-fold compared to global patterns
Jun 2024, phys.org
Good news:
"Here, we provide clear evidence to show that the fourfold Arctic amplification previously reported is an anomaly caused by dominant modes of natural variability and the degree of forced amplification is consistently around three throughout the historical period."This research is important as it highlights the sensitivity of modeling climate change and the conclusions drawn to predict future patterns of global warming. Accounting for natural variability and identifying an amplification factor of three instead of four means future mitigation strategies may not have to be so severe in the decades to come.
via Pacific Northwest National Laboratory: Wenyu Zhou et al, Steady threefold Arctic amplification of externally forced warming masked by natural variability, Nature Geoscience (2024). DOI: 10.1038/s41561-024-01441-1
Image credit: This is what happens when you ask a robot to make you a picture of a "motivational poster" - AI Art - Motivational Poster I Got the Message - 2024
CO₂ puts heavier stamp on temperature than previously thought, analysis suggests
Jun 2024, phys.org
Bad News?
(They're using a new method to measure CO2 uptake in the ocean, and they're making big claims with said new method, so keep this on the radar.)
The average temperature 15 million years back when there was 650ppm of CO2, was over 18C (64.4F), which is 4 degrees warmer than today and about the level that the UN climate panel predicts for the year 2100 in the most extreme scenario (but in the 2100 scenario, the CO2 is high as 1100 ppm, and so based on this, the temperature predictions should also be higher, like possibly double)."The clear warning from this research is CO2 concentration is likely to have a stronger impact on temperature than we are currently taking into account."
via Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research and the Universities of Utrecht and Bristol: Caitlyn R. Witkowski et al, Continuous sterane and phytane δ13C record reveals a substantial pCO2 decline since the mid-Miocene, Nature Communications (2024). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-024-47676-9
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