How Climate Scientists Saw the Future Before It Arrived
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Summary
For decades, researchers have developed increasingly advanced models that emulate Earth’s interconnected systems, allowing scientists to foresee how climate change will unfold.
But the current generation of models is being proven wrong on regional and local scales, and the consequences of this are beginning to undermine society’s trust in climate science itself.
Climate scientists are now pursuing new strategies that leverage expertise in cloud physics, the dynamics of dust and machine learning to reconstruct the evolution of ice sheets and better capture the crucial role of atmospheric rivers in regional climates.
However, the Trump administration’s war on science poses an existential threat to this work, with researchers’ ability to monitor the planet and model its changes threatened with extinction.
The catastrophe of climate change, which models have long predicted, has arrived, and the question remains of whether society can similarly be awakened from its slumber before it’s too late.
“It’s an incredibly exciting time to be working on climate modeling,” says climate scientist Wilco Hazeleger. “But we have to acknowledge that we’re living through the consequences of a deficit of action.
