Experts worry there isn’t enough appreciation of the risks associated with new weather patterns we don’t yet understand
If anyone should be attuned to the real-world impacts of global warming, it’s the policymakers and business heads that have to deal with the fallout. But even the most well-intentioned can fail to grasp just how bad things could get if climate goals aren’t met.
Decisionmakers don’t fully comprehend the second-order effects, after physical destruction, that increasingly extreme weather events will have on our social and economic systems. Some of these outcomes are hard to predict and that uncertainty will only grow the more fossil fuels we burn. Pitman, director of a multi-university centre on climate extremes in Australia who has also contributed to previous IPCC reports, points to financial stress tests and macroeconomic modelling as one example of where this kind of thinking goes wrong.
Seneviratne, meanwhile, says industry and economic analysts might be missing how different climate change impacts will interact with each other. “Different regions’ risks are interconnected and this means much more risk altogether to society,” she said. To make matters worse, that narrow understanding of climate risks is often accompanied by an overconfidence in the ability of modelling to produce very granular forecasts. Pitman says central banks that are beginning to test financial institutions on climate risk assume degrees of precision that simply aren’t yet possible. “The argument I hear is that it’s better than nothing,” he said. “That is profoundly false, it is just plain wrong.
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