And, getting some play in today’s press:
Earth Warming Faster Than Expected
Before quoting some of the text, let me say right now that I don’t like that headline. Onward:
By 2050, global average temperature could be between 1.4C and 3C warmer than it was just a couple of decades ago, according to a new study that seeks to address the largest sources of uncertainty in current climate models. That’s substantially higher than estimates produced by other climate analyses, suggesting that Earth’s climate could warm much more quickly than previously thought.
Many factors affect global and regional climate, including planet-warming “greenhouse” gases, solar activity, light-scattering atmospheric pollutants, and heat transfer among the land, sea, and air, to name just a few. There are so many influences to consider that it makes determining the effect of any one factor—despite years and sometimes decades of measurements—difficult.
[…]
The higher end of the team’s range of likely warming scenarios is between 0.5C and 0.75C warmer than the scenarios published in the last report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Rowlands says. “These sorts of numbers haven’t been seen in other complex climate models.”
[…]
The actual paper:
Broad range of 2050 warming from an observationally constrained large climate model ensemble
One published comment:
Climate science: Constraints on the high end
The BBC’s take:
Temperatures could rise by 3C by 2050, models suggest
Some thoughts:
This is the type of work that can be greatly misunderstood and misrepresented.
Even the title of the Science article entry (not the actual scientific paper) is misleading. The BBC article title puts a lot of onus upon the reader understanding the word “could”.
The model results’ midpoint for the temperature rise by 2050 isn’t so different from previous estimates. It’s just that the distribution (of thousands of runs changing small parameters) of projections ranges more on the high side than some of the previous.