The article in the url below makes the case that scientists significantly under-estimated the threat posed by climate change. Although the potential scale was misunderstood, it was the pace of change that scientists most failed to predict:
"Science is a process of discovery. It can move slowly as the pieces of a puzzle fall together and scientists refine their investigative tools. But in the case of climate, this deliberation has been accompanied by inertia born of bureaucratic caution and politics. A recent essay in Scientific American argued that scientists 'tend to underestimate the severity of threats and the rapidity with which they might unfold' and said one of the reasons was 'the perceived need for consensus.' This has had severe consequences, diluting what should have been a sense of urgency and vastly understating the looming costs of adaptation and dislocation as the planet continues to warm."
The results of this (somewhat understandable) caution are increasingly obvious and potentially devastating:
"In 1990, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the United Nations group of thousands of scientists representing 195 countries, said in its first report that climate change would arrive at a stately pace, that the methane-laden Arctic permafrost was not in danger of thawing, and that the Antarctic ice sheets were stable. Relying on the climate change panel's assessment, economists estimated that the economic hit would be small, providing further ammunition against an aggressive approach to reducing emissions and to building resilience to climate change."
More recent models, of course, suggest a very different picture:
"The climate change panel seems finally to have caught up with the gravity of the climate crisis. Last year, the organization detailed the extraordinary difficulty of limiting warming to 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit (1.5 degrees Celsius), over the next 80 years, and the grim consequences that will result even if that goal is met."
Most concerning:
"More likely, a separate United Nations report concluded, we are headed for warming of at least 5.4 degrees Fahrenheit. That will come with almost unimaginable damage to economies and ecosystems. Unfortunately, this dose of reality arrives more than 30 years after human-caused climate change became a mainstream issue."
Take care
Most concerning:
"More likely, a separate United Nations report concluded, we are headed for warming of at least 5.4 degrees Fahrenheit. That will come with almost unimaginable damage to economies and ecosystems. Unfortunately, this dose of reality arrives more than 30 years after human-caused climate change became a mainstream issue."
Take care
David
David Chandler
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How Scientists Got Climate Change so Wrong
By Eugene Linden
November 10, 2019
The New York Times
Late Edition – Final
SR4
