Climate Uncertainty & Risk: the presentation - Highlighted Article

From: Climate Etc.

By: Judith Curry

Date: February 24, 2023

Climate Uncertainty & Risk: the presentation

A 20 minute presentation on Climate & Uncertainty and Risk (including some content from my forthcoming book)

This was presented at the ICCC Conference.  Here is a link to my complete presentation with audio [presentation].  Lindzen and McKitrick also gave excellent presentations in this session (I assume the presentations will be made available online in a few days).

Most of this material will be familiar from previous blog posts, here is the text of my presentation with some images.

What we know, versus what we don’t and cannot know

Even people that don’t know much about climate science have heard that 97% of climate scientists agree.  But exactly what do they agree on?  Not nearly as much as is portrayed in the media.  Everyone agrees that:

• Surface temperatures have increased since 1880
• Humans are adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, and
• Carbon Dioxide and other greenhouse gases have a warming effect on the planet

However, there is disagreement on the most consequential issues:

• How much of the recent warming has been caused by humans
• How much the planet will warm in the 21st century
• Whether warming is ‘dangerous’
• And how we should respond to the warming, to improve human well being

The first two points are in the realm of science, requiring logical arguments, model simulations and expert judgment to assess “whether” and “how much.” The issue of “dangerous” is an issue of societal values, about which science has little to say. Whether reducing CO2 emissions will improve human wellbeing is an issue of economics and technology. This is also contingent on the relative importance of natural climate variability versus human-caused global warming for the 21st century. (continue reading)

Climate Uncertainty & Risk: the presentation