Cameron
Member
- Location
- Ontario, Canada
An inteview on climate change with respect to the local weather events this year. Brief extract below.
https://grist.org/article/is-climat...mail&utm_source=newsletter&utm_campaign=daily
Qo you hope the heatwave and other extreme weather events will alert the public to the variability of a couple of degrees C of warming?
A: I hope so. I think this just keeps coming back to this notion that a degree or two of global warming doesn’t sound like a lot, but it is a tremendous shift in the system. But that’s not intuitively obvious to really anyone except for folks who really understand the dynamics of these nonlinear Earth systems interactions. I think we’ve had, from a broader societal standpoint, kind of a failure of imagination in the sense that there hasn’t been enough conversation about what it really means to warm a degree or two degrees or five degrees, god forbid. I don’t think people really understand — and I think this is even true of some scientists, even some climate scientists, honestly. People who are climate scientists might study the carbon cycle or might study large-scale dynamics or paleoclimate. I think a lot specifically about the extreme climate, these transient huge bursts of severe weather that can occur. And we’re adding a lot of extra energy to the system.
https://grist.org/article/is-climat...mail&utm_source=newsletter&utm_campaign=daily
Qo you hope the heatwave and other extreme weather events will alert the public to the variability of a couple of degrees C of warming?
A: I hope so. I think this just keeps coming back to this notion that a degree or two of global warming doesn’t sound like a lot, but it is a tremendous shift in the system. But that’s not intuitively obvious to really anyone except for folks who really understand the dynamics of these nonlinear Earth systems interactions. I think we’ve had, from a broader societal standpoint, kind of a failure of imagination in the sense that there hasn’t been enough conversation about what it really means to warm a degree or two degrees or five degrees, god forbid. I don’t think people really understand — and I think this is even true of some scientists, even some climate scientists, honestly. People who are climate scientists might study the carbon cycle or might study large-scale dynamics or paleoclimate. I think a lot specifically about the extreme climate, these transient huge bursts of severe weather that can occur. And we’re adding a lot of extra energy to the system.