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Climate change forced by greenhouse gases means that all years can now be expected to be warm by past standards.
PHOTO: AFP
The Economist
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Dr Gavin Schmidt, a leading climate modeller and the boss of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Goddard Institute for Space Science (GISS) in New York City, is not noted for his humility. Nevertheless, writing in Nature, a journal, in March 2024, he confessed to being humbled by his inability, and that of his colleagues, to understand the extraordinary 12 months through which they had just lived. The year 2023 had been around 0.2 deg C hotter than had been expected.
Not just humbled: worried, too. If climate modellers’ accumulated knowledge and spiffy models could not explain what had just happened, it might mean that climate change had pushed the workings of the earth into “uncharted territory... fundamentally altering how the climate system operates”. Both the speed of climate change and the workings of the climate might be changing. The future might look even worse than it used to.
