Simulating the Climate’s Possible Futures

Jadwiga (Yaga) Richter, a scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colorado, uses one of the world’s most sophisticated Earth system models to explore what would happen if we reflected sunlight to cool the planet. Speaking with the Rocky Mountains behind her, she took us inside GLENS, the Geoengineering Large Ensemble: 20 simulations of the climate from 2020 to 2100, each a slightly different version of our future. Some of the results were hopeful. Others were a warning.

HW filmed Yaga remotely, redesigned her slides and edited the final video. Yaga’s talk showed that even 20 million hours of supercomputing had “only just scratched the surface,” and that understanding the full picture will take more simulations, better observations of the stratosphere and more computing power.