Opinion
How Scientists Got Climate Change So Wrong
Few thought it would arrive so quickly. Now we’re facing consequences once viewed as fringe scenarios.
By Eugene Linden
Mr. Linden has written widely about climate change.
Nov. 8, 2019
When both underestimation and overestimation occur, and only the latter is penalized, underestimation is baked into the consensus conclusions. Because underestimation is by far the most costly error, a proper risk/benefit analysis should exclude it in favor of mid-range to worst case estimation.
sealevel.jpg
How Scientists Got Climate Change So Wrong
Few thought it would arrive so quickly. Now we’re facing consequences once viewed as fringe scenarios.
By Eugene Linden
Mr. Linden has written widely about climate change.
Nov. 8, 2019
For decades, most scientists saw climate change as a distant prospect. We now know that thinking was wrong. This summer, for instance, a heat wave in Europe penetrated the Arctic, pushing temperatures into the 80s across much of the Far North and, according to the Belgian climate scientist Xavier Fettweis, melting some 40 billion tons of Greenland’s ice sheet.
Had a scientist in the early 1990s suggested that within 25 years a single heat wave would measurably raise sea levels, at an estimated two one-hundredths of an inch, bake the Arctic and produce Sahara-like temperatures in Paris and Berlin, the prediction would have been dismissed as alarmist. But many worst-case scenarios from that time are now realities.
Had a scientist in the early 1990s suggested that within 25 years a single heat wave would measurably raise sea levels, at an estimated two one-hundredths of an inch, bake the Arctic and produce Sahara-like temperatures in Paris and Berlin, the prediction would have been dismissed as alarmist. But many worst-case scenarios from that time are now realities.
When both underestimation and overestimation occur, and only the latter is penalized, underestimation is baked into the consensus conclusions. Because underestimation is by far the most costly error, a proper risk/benefit analysis should exclude it in favor of mid-range to worst case estimation.
sealevel.jpg
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