Timeline of the Next 80 Years

What does the future hold for humanity and our changing climate in the 21st century? Using projections from the IPCC Fifth Report and the climate science literature, we've put together a timelapse showing what may lie ahead. On the left hand side of the screen you'll see an "optimistic" view, where although we continue to emit carbon dioxide at significant levels, investments in clean energy and mitigation try to curb the damage. On the right hand side, you'll see a future where humanity emits as much as we please and very little mitigation takes place.

The data presented in this video are a projection of the 21st century. We used two of the Representative Concentration Pathways (RCP), presented in the IPCC Fifth Report, as plausible scenarios - although these are not strictly forecasts. Seasonal variations were added using a stochastic generator conditioned upon observed seasonal variability reported by NASA GISS. Similarly, seasonal variability in carbon dioxide levels were simulated based on historical seasonal variations about a moving average predicted using the RCP models. Special thanks to Gavin Schmidt for advice during the course of this video production.

And sorry for the typo at the very end! *It’s!!!

Resources:

► Big thanks to the huge team who helped put together the IPCC Fifth Report from which much of the projections in this video come from

► Temperature spirals were inspired by Ed Hawkins

► NASA GISS global mean temperature record used to generate seasonal variations

► Visualizations of the Earth under RCP 8.5 and RCP 4.5 by Alex Kekesi, NASA's Scientific Visualization Studio and NASA Center for Climate Simulation

► Carbon dioxide historical data comes from Mauna Loa

► Represenative Concentration Pathays (RCP) Emission scenarios

► Also recommend reading the SRES Special Report on Emissions Scenarios

► Knutti & Sedláček (2013), "Robustness and uncertainties in the new CMIP5 climate model projections", Nature Clim Change, 3, 369

► Overland & Wang (2013), "When will the summer Arctic be nearly sea ice free?", Geophysical Research Letters, 40, 2097

► Huang, Yu, Guan, Wang & Guo (2016), "Accelerated dryland expansion under climate change", Nature Clim Change, 6, 166

► Annunzioa, Sandkera, Finegold & Min (2015), "Projecting global forest area towards 2030", Forest Ecology & Management, 352, 124

► Biodiversity projections from GloBio, Convention on Biological Diversity

► Westerling (2018), "Wildfire Simulations for California's Fourth Climate Change Assesment in Extreme Wildfire Events with a Warming Climate", Special Report for California's Fourth Climate Change Assesment

► Intro music is Cylinder Four () by Chris Zabriskie (); licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license ()

► Background music is a cover of "Isolated System", originally by Muse, performed by Nick Caville

And also...

► Columbia University Department of Astronomy

► Cool Worlds Lab website

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