For all we care, climate is everything. It is the the air and the clouds, it is all oceans, all living things, everything above or under the ground. Everything interacts with everything and energy flows left, right, up and down. If you change any one thing one, you eventually change all of them. Climate is overwhelmingly complex to comprehend, and so is climate change. Let’s tackle the complexity one bit a time.
This is a work in progress.
- Climate science
- What is climate? What is the difference between weather and climate?
- How has the climate changed over the last 2 million years (roughly when Hominids began to make and use simple tools)? How do we know? How much of what has changed was due to the human activities?
- How do the greenhouse gasses work? If you add more, how does the climate react, and on what timeline? Are there diminishing returns to adding greenhouse gasses, or is the relationship linear or exponential?
- What do we know about climate feedbacks? What are the thresholds and timescales of those feedbacks?
- How would life for living things change with each step of more greenhouse gasses?
- What we do not know about the climate or climate change, but would be essential to know?
- Economics
- What are the costs of climate change? How to measure?
- What are the benefits of climate change? How to measure?
- What is (are) baseline scenario(s) from which to begin cost-and-benefit analysis?
- How much useful energy will the world need in medium to long term?
- What is the cost optimal trade-off between mitigation and elimination? Is there one optimal path, or several similarly attractive pathways exist?
- Technology development
- Technologies for climate change mitigation ordered by cost and potential impact.
- Any prospects in the pipeline?
- Policies
- Climate policies so far vs. performance of implementation.
- How should the end goal be formulated? Is it necessarily “zero net emissions by year x”?
- What is the goal that can be realistically implemented?