12ish Things to Know about Climate Science: A Primer for Policy-making

This post was originally written on January 18th, 2018.

This is a document I wrote up with my co-instructors for a class we taught in the lead-up to the Paris climate conference (COP 21). Rather than present our students with the bewildering forest of information that climate science produces, we wanted to boil down the most important messages that are relevant to international climate policy. Since climate science (like the climate itself) is non-stationary, this is now slightly out of date but hopefully still helpful for those looking at base-level understanding. Comments welcome, as always.

If I had to pick one thing from this list of 12 that I think most people don’t understand, it’s that climate change is a cumulative problem. Carbon dioxide remains in the atmosphere for centuries after it has been emitted, meaning that the warming we experience is not just due to the emissions over the last year or last decade, but all the emissions since at least the beginning of the industrial revolution. Looking forward, the implication is that if we want to arrest climate change at any level — 1.5C, 2C, 3C, even 4C or higher — at some point, we have a finite budget of greenhouse gases to emit for the rest of human history. Before we expend our budget, we have to stop emitting all greenhouse gases. Zero emissions.

Of course, the faster we get to zero, the better.

Click here for the list of 12:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/j8rbkyzjkm421k7/12%20Things%20to%20Know.pdf?dl=0