Date: December 5, 2024
Time: 2:30 p.m. – 5:00 p.m.
Venue: Auditorium between Building 4 & 5
What do we know for sure about the causes and extent of current climate change?
By Professor Tadeusz (Tad) Patzek
This seminar answers the following question: What are the appropriate initial conditions and minimal set of global data that give truthful historical temperature anomalies (ΔT) to-date and enable the high-fidelity predictions of ΔT 80-100 years into the future using a simple algebraic model and uncertainties associated with it? This minimal set consists of the global land and sea surface temperatures, cumulative total emissions (CTE) of CO2 from agriculture and land-use change (AL), burning fossil fuels (FF), and a realistic projection of future FF production based on geology and petroleum engineering. Auxiliary information about air quality improvements since the 1970s, and about seawater levels and polar ice cap melts quantifies other aspects of climate change. If the Global Climate Models did not exist; these data and a simple model that converts CTE into the global and land ΔTs would suffice to quantify the most likely trajectories of climate change over land and globally and their 2σ uncertainties. The conversion of CTE into polar ice cap melts, and global seawater rise can also be obtained. The link between CTE and ΔT are conditioned by our physically and politically plausible scenario of future FF production is close to IPCC’s Shared Socioeconomic Pathway (SSP)2-4.5. Given our scenario, we predict with 95% confidence that the global temperature anomaly will be 2.0°æ0.15° C by 2050 and 2.9°æ0.27◦C by 2100; and over land 2.9°æ0.28°C and 4.3°æ0.49°C, respectively. These predictions agree almost exactly with the SSP2-4.5 scenario.