Extreme weather events will become even more frequent as Earth enters a period of climate change that will likely be faster than what’s occurred naturally over the last thousand years. According to a new study, the speed with which temperatures change will continue to increase over the next several decades, intensifying the impacts of climate change.
For this research, scientist Steve Smith and colleagues at the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory examined the changes over decades rather than centuries to determine what temperature will be felt by humans alive today. They focused especially on changes over 40-year periods because this is the lifetime of houses and human-built infrastructure, and concluded that we will need to adapt.
The team of scientists examined how fast temperatures changed between 1850 and 1930, when the amount of fossil fuel gases in the atmosphere was low. These rates were then compared to temperatures reconstructed from natural sources of climate information, such as from tree rings, corals and ice cores, for the past 2,000 years.
While there was little average global temperature increase in the early period, the computer models showed that rates of change over 40-year periods of time in North America and Europe rose and fell as much as 0.2 degrees Celsius per decade, mostly because of natural variability. But after a similar analysis for the time period between 1971 and 2020, scientists found a rate of change of 0.3 degrees Celsius per decade, higher than can be accounted for by natural variability.
The team also examined how possible future scenarios would affect the climate and found that even scenarios with lower rates of future greenhouse gas emissions still speed up the climate change in the next 40 years.
“In these climate model simulations, the world is just now starting to enter into a new place, where rates of temperature change are consistently larger than historical values over 40-year time spans,” said lead author Steve Smith. “We need to better understand what the effects of this will be and how to prepare for them.”
However, researchers stated that they can’t say exactly what impact will this have on the Earth and its inhabitants.