The Climate Is Changing in Ways Models Couldn’t Predict

SPEAKER_1 (0:02)

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Sarah Holder (0:08)

Tens of thousands of people are gathered this week in Antalya, Turkey, for the 31st Annual Conference of the Parties, the UN's annual Climate Change Summit. Bloomberg's Laura Millan is on the ground there.

Laura Millan (0:22)

Co-op is a bit like humanity. It's chaotic, it's very, very varied. So one can see people from all countries. Many are dressed in their traditional clothes, their diplomats, but also activists, business people, people from all sorts of trades that are here to talk and discuss climate.

When we first started reporting this story, we asked ourselves a question. Are we living in the future? Are the impacts that we are seeing worse than expected a few years back when climate projections, when climate modeling started?

Sarah Holder (1:00)

I'm Sarah Holder, and this is the Big Take from Bloomberg News. Today on the show, the science and politics of climate change. Bloomberg's Laura Millan reports from COP31 in Turkey, on a planet that's changing faster than expected, and what global leaders plan to do about it.

Every year, world leaders meet at the conference of the parties to discuss climate goals and come to agreements around commitments each country can make to achieve them. Laura, what are the priorities this year during COP31?

Laura Millan (1:35)

This year, the main priority set by the Turkish presidency revolves around electrification. So the presidency wants countries to agree on a global target for electrification to reach 35% of energy sources coming from electricity by 2035 So it's conveniently phrased as 35 by 35

So what that means is, for example, electrifying cars, so having more electric vehicles around, but also if you're at your home and you have a gas stove to turn that into an electric or induction stove.

Sarah Holder (2:13)

Famously, the Paris Agreement was first adopted at a COP in 2015, more than 10 years ago.

That's the pact that commits almost 200 countries to keep global warming to no more than 2 degrees Celsius and ideally 1.5 degrees Celsius, so above pre-industrial levels. Laura, how is the world doing on those goals?

Laura Millan (2:33)

Not good. People are listening to us anywhere they are in the world. I'm sure they've experienced some form of the impacts of climate change, whether it is storms or heat or wildfires. What the WMO, the World Meteorological Organization tells us, is that temperatures are 1.47 degrees higher than they were in pre-industrial times this year already, that we might surpass the 1.5 threshold this year and potentially next, because to the impacts of climate change, we need to add the phenomenon of El Niño that is building in the Pacific Ocean and that will have impacts across the whole world for the next few months. So the short answer is we are not doing well, we keep emitting greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and the planet keeps warming up and we are all feeling it.

Sarah Holder (3:28)

As the planet keeps warming over the years, climate scientists have tried to model the kinds of extreme weather that could come with this kind of climate change.

When things like heat waves or natural disasters or wildfires could hit and how people should be preparing. Laura, you've been looking at some of those models to see how closely their predictions track with our current reality. What did you find?

Laura Millan (3:53)

So we started looking at what these models were projecting and comparing them against reality. So we didn't do that ourselves.

That's highly technical work. Models are essentially scenarios, simulations of the world made using millions of data points, gathered across years and different geographies, and then blended into these again, giant models that simulate the world. What we found, what scientists found, and they told us they found and they showed it to us, and as we are telling in this story, is that for some of these models, the projections were more conservative or were different from the reality.

Scientists have been able to accurately predict how much global temperatures would rise based on the amount of greenhouse gases that humans emitted. The more greenhouse gases, the more temperatures would rise. But the difficulty now lies in figuring out how the warming will impact specific geographies, specific regions, specific places, and how fast the impacts will manifest. And that is where the discrepancy lies. What we found, for example, is that Europe is hitting faster than models were expecting. The US Southwest is drying up faster than what models were projecting. We also found that it's really hard to accurately predict el niño, when it will hit, and how it will manifest. So scientists are working on these models all the time, trying to refine them. But in some cases, there are still discrepancies, and that has huge implications for how we plan and we prepare for these climate impacts.