In my writing on climate change, I frequently point out that the complexity of the Earth’s climate greatly reduces our ability to understand the future effects that we will see from secondary, tertiary and higher-order effects of climate change. There are several things that we can do to clarify this cloudy future:
- Continue to develop ever more powerful computer-simulations of our climate
- Continue to support scientists’ work to better understand future climate-related effects, and integrate this knowledge into the above simulations
This post covers both of these subjects, including: a better understanding we have of a secondary effect of climate change that I have written about previously, awards that the U.S. Department of Energy recently made to perform the work described in (2) above, and parts of the recently passed Inflation Reduction Act that incentivizes the Petroleum Industry to reduce its methane emissions. The last section reviews California’s $54 billion in new spending on clean energy and drought resilience.