Our climate models have a big, dangerous blind spot

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EXECUTIVE SUMMARY Climate change itself is increasingly fueling climate change. Rising concentrations of greenhouse gases are driving up global temperatures, setting off dangerous feedback loops that we have not fully accounted for in our climate models—or our emissions-reduction goals.

执行摘要：气候变化本身正日益加剧气候变化。温室气体浓度的上升正在推高全球气温，引发了我们在气候模型或减排目标中尚未充分考虑的危险反馈循环。

Scientists have long warned that warming would propel further warming in various ways, but a growing number of observations and studies are at last providing a sharper sense of just how powerful these cascading effects could be. And, by extension, they’re showing how much faster the planet may warm in this century.

科学家们早就警告说，变暖会以各种方式推动进一步的变暖，但越来越多的观察和研究终于让我们更清晰地认识到这些连锁反应可能有多么强大。由此推论，它们也显示了本世纪地球变暖的速度可能会有多快。

A study in Environmental Research Letters in September, synthesizing the results of previous papers, found that the additional carbon dioxide and methane released from thawing permafrost, intensifying wildfires, hotter lakes and reservoirs, and wetter, warmer wetlands alone could drive global average temperatures up 0.2 °C to 0.4 °C this century. That would come on top of the 2.6°C of warming above preindustrial levels that modelers are already expecting through 2100.

九月份发表在《环境研究快报》上的一项研究综合了以往论文的结果，发现仅由永久冻土融化、加剧的野火、更热的湖泊和水库以及更潮湿、更温暖的湿地所释放的额外二氧化碳和甲烷，就可能在本世纪将全球平均气温推高 0.2°C 至 0.4°C。这还不包括模型预测者已经预期的到 2100 年气温将比工业化前水平升高 2.6°C 的情况。

The additional heat could subject many of the world’s cities to monthslong heat waves and expose hundreds of millions of people to flooding. None of the models that inform the major UN climate reports, which assess how much the planet will likely warm under various emissions scenarios, account for all these feedback effects. Many of them don’t incorporate any.

额外的热量可能使世界上许多城市遭受长达数月的极端高温，并使数亿人面临洪水威胁。为联合国主要气候报告提供依据的模型（这些报告评估了在各种排放情景下地球可能变暖的程度）均未考虑所有这些反馈效应。其中许多模型甚至根本没有纳入任何此类效应。

That leaves a huge blind spot in our understanding of how much the world could actually warm in the coming decades—and how rapidly nations will need to slash emissions to stay within critical boundaries. A separate analysis published in One Earth in March, which examined what the feedback problem for our international climate goals, concluded that the world may be much further off track than is widely believed.

这使得我们在理解未来几十年世界实际可能变暖的程度，以及各国需要以多快的速度削减排放以保持在关键界限内的问题上，留下了一个巨大的盲点。三月份发表在《一个地球》上的一项独立分析研究了反馈问题对我们国际气候目标的意义，结论是世界偏离轨道的程度可能远超人们的普遍认知。

It found that just three regional sources of warming-driven emissions—thawing permafrost, increasing fires in boreal forests, and warming tropical wetlands—may shorten by as much as 25% the time before the planet consistently breaches the 1.5 °C and 2 °C warming thresholds.

研究发现，仅三个由变暖驱动的区域性排放源——永久冻土融化、北方森林火灾增加以及热带湿地变暖——就可能使地球持续突破 1.5°C 和 2°C 升温阈值的时间缩短多达 25%。

Our climate models and the UN’s reports clearly need to be updated to better represent these effects. Nations must also step up their efforts to reduce emissions to reflect this improving understanding of the dangers we face, says Sam Abernethy, the lead author of the paper and a climate scientist at Spark Climate Solutions, a San Francisco–based nonprofit research group.

该论文的主要作者、旧金山非营利研究组织 Spark Climate Solutions 的气候科学家 Sam Abernethy 表示，我们的气候模型和联合国的报告显然需要更新，以更好地反映这些影响。各国也必须加大减排力度，以反映我们对所面临危险的日益深入的了解。

At least some of this is starting to happen. Spark kick-started an initiative, called the Warming-Induced Greenhouse Gas Emissions Model Intercomparison Project, through which more than 20 international teams are running the same set of analyses on different models to develop greater understanding of feedback effects’ potential power.

这种情况至少已经开始发生。Spark 发起了一项名为“变暖诱导温室气体排放模型比对项目”的倡议，通过该项目，20 多个国际团队正在对不同的模型运行同一套分析，以加深对反馈效应潜在力量的理解。

Researchers involved hope that the UN will incorporate those results into its next major climate assessment, due out in 2029. That report will update estimates of the remaining emissions that can be released before the world crosses key temperature thresholds.

参与的研究人员希望联合国能将这些结果纳入其定于 2029 年发布的下一次重大气候评估中。该报告将更新关于在世界跨越关键温度阈值之前还可以排放的剩余排放量的估算。

But what is already clear is that the planet is rapidly warming and that nations haven’t done nearly enough to cut fossil-fuel pollution. And even if we did manage to halt it, warming-driven emissions could continue. So a number of the research groups involved in the recent studies have started to explore what nations could do to get feedback emissions under control.

但显而易见的是，地球正在迅速变暖，而各国在削减化石燃料污染方面做得还远远不够。即使我们设法阻止了污染，由变暖驱动的排放也可能持续存在。因此，参与近期研究的一些研究小组已经开始探索各国可以采取什么措施来控制反馈排放。

Scientists at the Woodwell Climate Research Center in Massachusetts are, for example, investigating the possibility of preventing fires or rapidly detecting them and putting them out when they threaten to burn the vegetation and soil that help insulate particularly carbon-rich wedges of permafrost.

例如，马萨诸塞州伍德威尔气候研究中心的科学家们正在研究预防火灾的可能性，或者在火灾威胁到燃烧有助于隔绝富含碳的永久冻土层的植被和土壤时，迅速发现并扑灭火灾。

In addition, the Environmental Defense Fund’s Climate Innovation Initiative has backed lab research on the potential of adding sulfate, iron, or other compounds to wetlands to counteract fast-rising methane emissions. Several startups are also exploring possibilities.

此外，环境保护基金会的气候创新倡议支持了一项实验室研究，探讨在湿地中添加硫酸盐、铁或其他化合物以抵消快速上升的甲烷排放的潜力。几家初创公司也在探索各种可能性。

They’re looking into suppressing the lightning strikes that are igniting more and more fires in high latitudes, placing synthetic mats above permafrost to prevent it from melting, and deploying autonomous drones to quickly suppress potentially high-emissions fires before they burn out of control.

他们正在研究抑制在高纬度地区引发越来越多火灾的闪电，在永久冻土层上方放置合成垫以防止其融化，以及部署自动无人机在火灾失控前迅速扑灭可能产生高排放的火灾。

Investigating all these ideas is worthwhile. But researchers are only in the earliest stages of figuring out how big a dent in emissions any such efforts could achieve across sprawling global ecosystems undergoing massive transformations. The surest path to reducing the effect of warming-driven warming remains the one we’ve known all along: breaking society’s addiction to fossil fuels.

研究所有这些想法都是值得的。但研究人员目前仅处于初步阶段，尚无法确定这些努力能在经历巨大变革的全球生态系统中实现多大的减排效果。减少变暖驱动的变暖效应的最可靠途径仍然是我们一直以来所知的：打破社会对化石燃料的依赖。