Chapter 08 · Resources
Predictions of Future Climate Change
Emission scenarios, how climate models are built and tested, and what a few degrees of warming looks like over deep time.
More about SSP scenarios
Climate models
How do climate models work?
This is an epic article about how climate models work.
carbonbrief.org ↗
SimMod
For those with more programming experience, a simple energy balance model in python.
github.com ↗
Demystifying Climate Models
If you want more detail, check out the book by Gettelman and Rood. The book is available for free on-line.
springer.com ↗
How well have climate models projected global warming?
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.
carbonbrief.org ↗
Climate Demon
If you want something with more detail, my colleague R. Saravanan has written a book about how to think about models.
amazon.com ↗
How modeling centers produce the models
Watch this great video by software engineer Steve Easterbrook about the efforts that modeling centers go through to produce the models. Highly recommended!
youtube.com ↗
Data on emissions and its drivers
CIA World Factbook
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.
cia.gov ↗
CO2 emissions
This is a good page about CO2 emissions.
ourworldindata.org ↗
Climate over deep time
Consequences of twenty-first-century policy for multi-millennial climate
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.
nature.com ↗
The scariest climate plot in the world
Dessler’s substack on the same argument.
theclimatebrink.com ↗
Future climates of the deep past
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.
pnas.org ↗
The Atlantic on extreme climate change
If you want something for a popular audience, read this. Grim, indeed.
theatlantic.com ↗