Global Warming’s Worst-Case Projections Look Increasingly Likely – MIT Technology Review

Jay OwenReforming Global Finance, Earth Systems Science, Beyond GDP

“Once again, we are reminded of the urgency of ending the fossilized industrial model and shifting by as early as 2030 to the renewably-resourced, knowledge-richer, circular economies and scaling up these technological means already available, to avoid disastrous global warming.  We can also capture CO2  efficiently, as we show in our Green Transition Scoreboard 2018 : “Capturing CO2 While Improving Human Nutrition & Health“  and related TV program “Investing in Saltwater Agriculture“ with NASA Chief Scientist Dennis Bushnell.

We now must face down the special interest representing 19th and 20th century fossilized industries and ally with the global movement of investors now shifting  their portfolios toward the future we call the Solar Age .

~Hazel Henderson,  Editor“

Global Warming’s Worst-Case Projections Look Increasingly Likely

A new study based on satellite observations finds that temperatures could rise nearly 5 °C by the end of the century.

The paper, published on Wednesday in Nature, found that global temperatures could rise nearly 5 °C by the end of the century under the the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s steepest  prediction for greenhouse-gas concentrations. That’s 15 percent hotter than the previous estimate. The odds that temperatures will increase more than 4 degrees by 2100 in this so-called “business as usual” scenario increased from 62 percent to 93 percent, according to the new analysis.

Climate models are sophisticated software simulations that assess how the climate reacts to various influences. For this study, the scientists collected more than a decade’s worth of satellite observations concerning the amount of sunlight reflected back into space by things like clouds, snow, and ice; how much infrared radiation is escaping from Earth; and the net balance between the amount of energy entering and leaving the atmosphere. Then the researchers compared that “top-of-atmosphere” data with the results of earlier climate models to determine which ones most accurately predicted what the satellites actually observed.

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The simulations that turned out to most closely match real-world observations of how energy flows in and out of the climate system were the ones that predicted the most warming this century. In particular, the study found, the models projecting that clouds will allow in more radiation over time, possibly because of decreased coverage or reflectivity, “are the ones that simulate the recent past the best,” says Patrick Brown, a postdoctoral research scientist at the Carnegie Institution and lead author of the study. This cloud feedback phenomenon remains one of the greatest areas of uncertainty in climate modeling.

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