Climate scientists have long warned that global warming would lead to extreme heat in many parts of the world. But the 120 degree Fahrenheit temperatures brought on by the heatwave in the Pacific Northwest in June were more in line with what researchers had imagined would occur later this century.
There’s a lot of headlines right now reading, “Models failed. Science didn’t predict these extremes.” That just doesn’t ring true to me, because there have long been predictions that we’d see much more frequent and more intense extreme heat waves, more frequent and more intense extreme downpours. And that’s exactly what’s happening. The magnitude of these specific events have been particularly extreme. But is that necessarily because the models failed in a way that they shouldn’t have failed? I’m not totally convinced that’s the case.
I think what’s interesting is actually the diversity of responses in the scientific community. There are some folks who say that they were pretty surprised by what’s happened recently. But there are also some folks who say, “Yeah, it’s certainly shocking, but not really scientifically surprising.” And I would generally fall into that latter group, actually, because I think where the divergence may be coming from is that I think historically there’s been a little bit of a lack of imagination regarding what different levels of warming actually mean.
