Each climate catastrophe reminds us: the Earth is already suffering the serious consequences of the industrial revolution and global warming caused mainly by human activity over the last 150 years. Greenhouse gases have increased alarmingly, leading to a rise in temperatures that could reach +4°C in places compared to 1850, thus threatening all of humanity in the long term. This warming is accelerating in a worrying manner, and scientists, like Gavin Schmidt of NASA Goddard Instituteseem taken aback or even disconcerted by the gap between their initial forecasts and the actual data from the field, a part of the warming appearing to be of unknown origin: “Either we have forgotten an important warming factor, or we have underestimated the speed of warming” says NASA Goddard Institute director.
Despite calculations and simulations which took into account phenomena such asThe Child and solar activity, current climate models have not been able to fully explain this unexpected rise in temperatures. Scientists are nevertheless beginning to take this acceleration into account: a study recently published in Science suggests that the effect of El Niño could be stronger than expected, partly explaining the differences observed (El Niño alone would have increased the temperature of the globe by a few tenths of degrees since 1977). Climatologists will therefore have to monitor this type of event in the coming years in order to check whether the scale of these phenomena is exceptional or whether their models need to be adjusted to better understand and, above all, anticipate the speed of global warming.
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