LONDON — The news is bad, and it's coming in fast. Turn tens of thousands of scientists loose on a problem for two decades, and the results will seem pathetic for the first few years, because it takes time to gather the data — even to build the equipment with which you gather the data. But slowly the flow of data will grow, and at the end of 20 years you can expect major new insights every month or so.
That's where we are now with climate change. September's unwelcome news, from the Hadley Center for Climate Prediction and Research in Britain, was that if fossil fuel use continues on the present trend line, the planet will be an average of 4 degrees Celsius warmer by the 2060s. This contrasts with the prediction of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, published in 2007, that we might see 4 C, at the most, by 2100.
The most recent bad news came from the drilling ship JOIDES Resolution (Joint Oceanographic Institutions for Deep Earth Sampling), which brought up cores from the ocean bottom containing sediments dating back 20 million years. The news was that when the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was last at 450 parts per million, the average global temperature was 3 to 6 C hotter than now, and the sea level was 25 to 40 meters higher.