Posted by Andrew Marr on Friday, March 06, 2020 15:59:49 If there’s one thing we have learned from this election cycle, it’s that people still don’t understand what climate change really means.
In a poll last year, only 40 per cent of Australians believed that climate change was a serious problem.
It’s the same across the political spectrum, from the most progressive to the most extreme.
And the public still seems to think that it is a very real and pressing problem.
The result is a kind of polarisation on climate change that is deeply worrying, both to those of us who care about the environment and to those who do not.
The fact that the public are still divided on the issue shows that we’re still in the process of building trust and understanding of the challenges facing us.
It also tells us a lot about the state of the debate.
When we start talking about climate change, we start with a different question.
What do we want to know about climate?
What we want is to know what climate is.
This is a tricky one.
If we want certainty about the future, then we should start with climate change.
If that’s the case, then it makes sense to start with the basics of climate change and then work backwards from there.
We can start by looking at the data.
Climate change is the natural world in which life, weather, ecosystems, animals and human behaviour have evolved over time.
We know what the climate is like today because of records that have been kept, such as the record of greenhouse gases that were in the atmosphere before the Industrial Revolution.
But what we don’t know is what the future climate will be like.
There are many things that are known about the climate, including what kinds of things can happen.
These are known as climate variables.
These range from how much CO 2 a particular place emits, to how hot the planet is, to what kinds, and where, of the ocean is.
They all have their effects, and we know what is likely to happen in the future.
We also know what will happen in our future, which means that we can be confident about what we know about the natural climate.
If you’re sceptical about climate science, this may not seem very helpful.
It is true that climate data are incomplete, which is partly because it takes many years for the climate to cool down and then grow again, as it has done since the industrial revolution.
But this process is extremely slow, and it’s the human actions that have contributed to climate change in the first place.
The idea that climate models are too slow is a common argument in climate scepticism, but it is not always wrong.
In fact, climate models have been a major part of the scientific debate for a long time.
Models are the tools we use to predict how much heat or precipitation will be in a given region of the world.
And models have proved remarkably accurate, given that they use a large amount of data and have been developed over a long period.
The models are the foundation of how scientists make their predictions about the amount of greenhouse gas emissions that are needed to keep the planet from warming to dangerous levels.
This has made them hugely important for understanding climate change; they provide important information about how much climate change is happening and how quickly it is happening.
They are also useful for understanding the physical processes that are going on inside the Earth and the behaviour of the climate.
And they can also tell us something about what our future climate looks like.
For example, a climate model might predict how a desert would change under a warmer climate, based on how much desert vegetation has grown there.
The climate model will also give us information about the temperature of the oceans, how much snow and ice is falling on the ground, and how much sea level rise is likely.
The information about climate and the Earth’s climate is all in the models.
If there is uncertainty about climate, there are many ways we can use this information to make better predictions about climate.
One of the simplest is to use the climate model to calculate the climate sensitivity, which measures how much warming is likely under different scenarios of the future with different greenhouse gas levels.
If climate sensitivity is 0.1°C, then the world would be hotter by about 2.5°C.
If the climate has a sensitivity of 0.2°C or higher, the world will be about 4°C hotter by 2100.
If temperature sensitivity is 1.0°C for all scenarios, the earth will be 5°C warmer by 2100 than it would be if the climate was 2°C sensitive.
If global warming is 4°F above preindustrial levels by 2100, the average global temperature will be 2°F warmer by the end of the century than it is today.
And climate models can be used to predict changes in the weather and ocean conditions over time, which could help to improve our understanding of climate and to predict when a warming planet will lead to extreme weather
