How much more money do we need to prove we’re in a climate emergency?

The BBC Science News website published a piece last night about extreme weather events where former Met Office chief scientist Prof Dame Julia Slingo said ‘the IPCC (climate computer) models are just not good enough’ and need more computing power, citing ‘ the costs … which would be in the hundreds of millions of pounds’. How much more money do we need to prove we’re in a climate emergency? And can we reliably model an increasingly chaotic complex system?

I fail to see how spending hundreds of millions of pounds more, is going to be that useful. Firstly, is it really needed to convince the world that we’re in a climate emergency?

Secondly, wouldn’t the money be better spent investing in meeting the carbon net-zero challenge?

Our obsession with describing the environment and threats to it, is distracts us from doing something. Surely we’ve already reached the point where things are deteriorating so fast, that it makes little sense to worry about being more accurate in our forecasting?

I understand that weather forecasts can save lives and economies but we’re no longer dealing with a predictable system. Complex system modellingThe process, either mathematically or in the human brain, of creating an internal version of something that we can refer to, to better understand how it functions and our place within. Scientific modelling is where we take the best knowledge we have and build a version of what will happen, if we assume certain parameters. For example, we might model More depends on stable patterns and trends.

For example, traditional weather patterns varied based on predictable fluctuations around seasonal, annual or ten-year cycles. The reason for this, was the actions of animals intensifying ecosystemHow ecosystems function An ecosystem is a community of lifeforms that interact in such an optimal way that how ecosystems function best, is when all components (including humans and other animals) can persist and live alongside each other for the longest time possible. Ecosystems are fuelled by the energy created by plants (primary producers) that convert the Sun's heat energy More processes. This is what regulated global temperatures and kept them within liveable boundaries. Surplus energyEnergy and nutrients are the same thing. Plants capture energy from the Sun and store it in chemicals, via the process of photosynthesis. The excess greenery and waste that plants create, contain chemicals that animals can eat, in order to build their own bodies and reproduce. When a chemical is used this way, we call it a nutrient. As we More from carbon dioxide was kept to an absolute minimum.

By burning fossil fuels and killing wildlife, we have removed vast amounts of carbon out of these natural processes and injected it into the atmosphere. Here, the free surplus energyThe energy of a system that is emitted as waste and is not part of ecosystem processes. There is always some free surplus energy as this creates the basis for evolution where new species exploit gaps in the ecosystem where free energy becomes available. Surplus energy can occur as a result of disruption or disturbance. When free surplus energy reaches More from these molecules has begun reacting in new and chaotic ways.

Complex systems are hard enough to model as it is, but who is to say ‘hundreds of millions of pounds’ will be enough? I doubt the meteorologists know how much is enough, because if they can’t predict the worst weather events now, how do they know how chaotic the system will end up in future?

I do wonder whether one of the reasons we underestimate these effects, is because we haven’t included animal impactWhat is Animal Impact? Without wildlife, Earth would not be habitable for humans, because it's animals that stabilise ecosystems. It’s a fundamental law of nature that animals (and humans) exist because we are the most likely lifeforms to minimise environmental chaos. Animal impact, therefore, is a measure of how much all wildlife is collectively responsible for creating a habitable Earth. The More in our calculations. Wildlife is having to work harder and the impact of extinction is greater than human-induced climate change.

At what point do we stop spending money on counting the cost and start picking up the broken pieces and rebuild. I am sceptical about the value of these proposals and would prefer to see money spent on solutions.