Climate Letter #2106

Why are so many expert climate scientists deeply worried about “catastrophic” results from current trends of climate change?  You need to have read yesterday’s letter about the results of a survey of opinions of 92 individuals who were qualified authors of the latest IPCC study.  A 60% majority of this group do not expect to see the kind of political response that is needed to stay within the IPCC’s climate change target of either 1.5C or 2.0C.  What these folks actually expect is the realization of temperature increases of 3C or more by the end of this century, which many of them describe in terms that are truly catastrophic. These are all well-trained scientists who collectively have the time to review and discuss most of the serious work being done by climate researchers everywhere, whether or not the studies are made use of when IPCC recommendations are finalized.  What do they learn that gives them such a pessimistic outlook, from reading studies that most of us have less reason to be familiar with?

I suspect that the best answer to that question would make reference to paleoclimatology, the study of Earth’s climate history in the deep past, going back many millions of years. There is a great deal of active interest in the subject, and much has been learned that is reasonably convincing, but not quite convincing enough to stand up to high standards of proof set at the topmost level of IPCC editors. Past results of paleo historians that were reported are commonly being replaced by new findings, and everything is fair game. That’s how the process works, and there is no alternative, but the study does have overall respectability as well as a considerable amount of fascination that most scientists should be intrigued by. So what is currently in their sights that all curious folks may want to know more about?

There was a study published three years ago in the PNAS journal that brought the paleo enterprise up to date and has attracted much attention—with at least 180 citations so far—entitled, “Pliocene and Eocene provide best analogs for near-future climates.”  It has open access and is mostly quite understandable: https://www.pnas.org/content/115/52/13288.  If you read the first few paragraphs, and study the temperature chart that soon follows you will want to keep going, to learn whatever is said about the results of the project—at the current state of extraordinarily rapid change, how close are we to replicating one or more of the milestones of deep climate history?  “We compare climates of the coming decades with climates drawn from six geological and historical periods spanning the past 50 My. Our study suggests that climates like those of the Pliocene will prevail as soon as 2030 CE and persist under climate stabilization scenarios.”  Without mitigation, we could rewind the climate clock by approximately 50 million years in just the next two centuries.

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For those who prefer reading a brief introduction to the study, Science Daily provided a good review including direct commentaries from the two lead authors:  https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/12/181210150614.htm.  The Semantic Scholar report is a wonderful resource that provides us with links to 157 recent studies, many of them from the past year, that have cited this work while adding the proprietary results of yet more recent research.  Complete abstracts are included as add-ons to each link: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Pliocene-and-Eocene-provide-best-analogs-for-Burke-Williams/bf145343564f93e06a5270dbaa3ad6532c788123.  The same service with abstracts added is also provided for each of the 67 references used by the study.

Carl

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