Chapter 8
More about SSP scenarios
Read this CarbonBrief description of the SSPs
Climate models
This is an epic article about how climate models work. For those with more programming experience, here is a simple energy balance model in python.
If you want more detail, check out the book Demystifying Climate Models by Gettelman and Rood. The book is available for free on-line.
Climate models have a good track record of forecasting future climate change, which is why we’re so confident about forecasts of a few degrees (C) of warming this century.
If you want something with more detail, my colleague R. Saravanan has written a book about how to think about models.
Watch this great video by software engineer Steve Easterbrook about the efforts that modeling centers go through to produce the models. Highly recommended!
data on emissions and its drivers
The CIA factbook is a great place to find data on population, affluence, technology, carbon emissions, and many other things for individual countries. What's amazing (to me, anyway) is how big the affluence gap is between the richest and poorest countries. If you're reading this, then you're probably in a pretty rich country; never forget how lucky you are that that's the case.
This is a good page about CO2 emissions.
climate over deep time
To me, one of the most disturbing facets of the climate problem relates to the long lifetime of CO2 (discussed in chapter 5): over the next few decades, we'll emit enough CO2 to seriously alter the climate for the next 10,000+ years. Here's a paper that lays out the argument. This is the basis for Dessler’s “scariest climate plot in the world”.
On a somewhat related note, worst-case scenarios are for an enormous amount of warming. This article talks about how climates we may experience within 200 years will be like the warm Pliocene (3 million years ago) or the very warm Eocene (50 million years ago), a period so warm there was no permanent ice on the planet.
If you want something for a popular audience, read this. Grim, indeed.