Extreme temperatures have shattered the grimmest expectations of a warming world and tested climate models.
It was meant to be a celebration. A group that included some of the world’s leading climate scientists gathered earlier this month at a home in the German city of Potsdam for a colleague’s birthday dinner.
In one camp is Professor James Hansen, famous as the NASA scientist who in 1988 warned the United States Congress that global warming was not just a real phenomenonHe now believes that warming is accelerating faster than scientists had anticipated, that the climate models relied upon by world governments have a built-in flaw that is underestimating warming, and that the Paris Accord’s ambition of holding warming to 1.5 degrees has already failed.
He believes that the extreme temperatures of the past year fall within the models – though at the extreme high end of them – and that declarations that they are broken and that we have already left the 1.5 target in our wake is dangerous.“There has been a tendency to exaggerate the science in favour of ‘doomist’ narratives,” he told this masthead this week. “That helps nobody – except the fossil fuel industry of course.
Hansen, and some others, believes that climate models used by scientists around the world, and the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, have failed to adequately take the impact of aerosol masking into consideration. Days before he noted a temperature recorded in Turkmenistan of 35C, 10 degrees above the previous record. “Latin America is boiling from Mexico to Argentina,” he wrote a day earlier. “Guyana 37.4 at Lethem, hottest March day in Guyana history set twice in few days.”Asked if he believes Hansen is right, Hare pauses carefully. “You know, I think it’s a dangerous thing to challenge Jim Hansen. Right. So one needs to be very, look very carefully at what he’s arguing.
Hausfather is cautious about dismissing Hansen’s position too. “All of 2023 was exceptionally warm, but it was really weird in the last four monthsHausfather explains that since we started pumping warming gasses into the atmosphere during the industrial revolution the world has warmed by about 1.3 degrees. A strong El Nino can force up the average temperature by around 0.2 degrees in addition to this at and after its peak.
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