What's Contested? What Don't We Know?
Climate Models — How Do We Know What Happens in 2100?
Four controversies: underestimate or overestimate? Climate sensitivity? Tipping points? Geoengineering (Beutelsbach)?
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Learning Material
6 pagesLesson 8 — What's Contested? What Don't We Know?
Understanding the Complex: Climate Models — How Do We Know What Happens in 2100?
Climate science has strong consensus on the big question — warming is happening, humans are driving it. But within that consensus, there are four genuine scientific debates worth knowing about. These aren't political disputes dressed up as technical ones. They're methodological disagreements among researchers who accept the basic physics but disagree on details that matter quantitatively.
And then there's geoengineering — which is where the technical and the political genuinely collide.