The Guardian: 'No one wants to be right about this': climate scientists' horror and exasperation ... [View all]

[OKIsItJustMe]

‘No one wants to be right about this’: climate scientists’ horror and exasperation as global predictions play out

Mon 24 Jul 2023 11.00 EDT
As the northern hemisphere burns, experts feel deep sadness – and resentment – while dreading what lies ahead this Australian summer

Guardian Australia asked seven leading climate scientists to describe how they felt as much of the northern hemisphere is engulfed by blistering heatwaves, and a number of global land and ocean climate records are broken.

‘I am stunned by the ferocity’
What is playing out all over the world right now is entirely consistent with what scientists expect. No one wants to be right about this. But if I’m honest, I am stunned by the ferocity of the impacts we are currently experiencing. I am really dreading the devastation I know this El Niño will bring. As the situation deteriorates, it makes me wonder how I can be most helpful at a time like this. Do I keep trying to pursue my research career or devote even more of my time to warning the public? The pressure and anxiety of working through an escalating crisis is taking its toll on many of us.

Dr Joëlle Gergis, senior lecturer in climate science Fenner School of Environment and Society, associate investigator ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate Extremes at the Australian National University

‘Even 1.2C of global warming isn’t safe’
We knew by the mid-1990s that lurking in the tails of our climate model projections were monsters: monstrous heatwaves, catastrophic extreme rainfall and floods, subcontinental-scale wildfires, rapid ice sheet collapse raising sea level metres within a century. We knew – just like we know gravity – that Australia’s Great Barrier Reef could be one of the earliest victims of uncontained global warming.

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