“If worldwide we’re spending trillions of dollars adapting to climate change, we’ve got to know exactly what we’re adapting to,” Palmer said, “whether it’s floods, droughts, storms or sea level rise.”
Palmer said climate models must get there. Despite technology’s progress, computers are still not typically sophisticated enough to operate at such a high resolution. But they can’t zoom in enough – even to a city level – to predict the most extreme events. Scientists use computer simulations of weather events to make projections of how they may change decades into the future. “That’s what we need for climate change.” “As an international organization, CERN has been hugely successful,” Palmer told CNN. (Photo by SEBASTIEN BOZON / AFP) (Photo by SEBASTIEN BOZON/AFP via Getty Images) Sebastien Bozon/AFP/Getty Imagesĭeadly floods inundated parts of Europe, but the Netherlands avoided fatalities. Rescue workers scrambled on July 17 to find survivors and victims of the devastation wreaked by the worst floods to hit western Europe in living memory, which have already left more than 150 people dead and dozens more missing. TOPSHOT - Soldiers of the German armed forces Bundeswehr search for flood victims in submerged vehicles on the federal highway B265 in Erftstadt, western Germany, on July 17, 2021, after heavy rains hit parts of the country, causing widespread flooding and major damage. “The signal is now large enough that we can ‘see’ it in the daily weather,” even though the models didn’t see it coming. “The signal is emerging from the noise more quickly” than models predicted, Mann said. It’s only the most extreme events that stand out as a clear signal. In climate models, Mann explained, day-to-day weather is just noise.
“The models are underestimating the magnitude of the impact of climate change on extreme weather events.” “There is an important factor with many of these events, including the recent ‘heat dome’ event out west, that the climate models don’t capture,” Mann said.
Mann, the director of the Earth System Science Center at Penn State University, told CNN the past few weeks have showed the limitation of climate change models. What’s harder for their models to predict – even as computers get more and more powerful – is how intense the impact will be. Since the 1970s, scientists have predicted the extent to which the world would warm fairly accurately. But many are expressing surprise that heat and rain records are being broken by such large margins. They said it would be deadly and it would be more frequent. And in the western United States, just weeks after a historic heatwave, some 20,000 firefighters and personnel have been deployed to extinguish 80 large fires that have consumed more than 1 million acres (4,047 square kilometers).Ĭlimate scientists have for decades warned that the climate crisis would lead to more extreme weather.
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