The New Climate We Live With

The New Climate We Live With

Over the past several decades we have had predictions of global warming and climate change due to human-caused greenhouse gas emissions. The underlying physics isn’t that difficult to understand. Greenhouse gases make the atmosphere more opaque to infrared radiation, resulting in the Earth radiating energy to space from a higher altitude in the troposphere, where it is colder. A colder temperature means less energy radiated to space, so more energy is absorbed by the Earth than it sheds to space.

Now, observations are catching up with the predictions: an increase in summer heat waves, more droughts or floods, wildfires and smoke from wildfires, thinning of west Antarctic ice sheets from warmer water beneath them, and stronger hurricanes that develop intensity in just 24 hours. June, July, August, and September all set records in global average temperature, even without a full El Niño. Underground aquifers across the United States are being irreversibly depleted. At the same time, The Economist reports an increasing global populist backlash against climate-change mitigation policies. In this talk, I will present more specifics.

A presentation by Dr. Keith Eric Grant