What keeps the world’s top climate scientists up at night?
Hundreds of climate experts expect global temperatures to rise to at least 2.5C (4.5F) above preindustrial levels by 2100. Damian Carrington reports
When the Guardian’s environment editor, Damian Carrington, decided to survey the world’s top climate scientists, he had no idea how many of them would want to participate.
“I was astonished by the flood of responses that came back,” he tells Hannah Moore.
With the help of Julian Ganz, the Guardian’s research manager, they approached every contactable lead author or review editor of Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports since 2018. Of the 843 scientists contacted, 380 replied.
“We’d ask a few simple questions, but we also had a field at the end that said: ‘Do you want to make any further comment?’ And oh boy, they really did,” Carrington says.
Reading the responses, he could feel this “overwhelming feeling of frustration and despair and unhappiness at being ignored for so many years, and the difficulty they’re having of living with this information”.
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