Climate change: science, data and projections

The science is settled. The projections, however, are not, they span a wide range of scenarios depending on choices made in the next few decades. What the IPCC actually says, what SSP and RCP scenarios mean in practice, and where the real uncertainties lie.

Scientists have been right about every climate projection for 50 years. Here’s what’s next.

Introduction

Here is a contradiction worth sitting with: climate models are among the most sophisticated computational tools ever built, running on supercomputers and drawing on decades of global measurements. And yet their central conclusion is strikingly simple. The Earth is warming, driven by human activity, faster than at any point in at least 800,000 years.

You have almost certainly heard this. What fewer people have been given is the actual framework (the science, the scenarios, the mechanisms) that would let them evaluate new information on their own rather than waiting to be told what to think.

This Foundation gives you that framework. By the end, you will know what the IPCC actually does, what SSP scenarios mean in plain terms, what a tipping point is and why it matters, and why the distinction between mitigation and adaptation is one of the defining political questions of our time.

Climate change: science, data and projections

Introduction

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