Some problems are so big, you can’t really see them.
Climate change is the perfect example. The basics are simple: the climate is heating up due to fossil fuel use. But the nitty gritty is so vast and complicated that our understanding of it is always evolving. Evolving so rapidly, in fact, that it’s basically impossible for humans to keep up.
« Since the first assessment report (AR) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 1990, we estimate that the number of studies relevant to observed climate impacts published per year has increased by more than two orders of magnitude, » scientists explain in a new paper, led by first author and quantitative data researcher Max Callaghan from the Mercator Research Institute on Global Commons and Climate Change (MCC) in Germany.
« This exponential growth in peer-reviewed scientific publications on climate change is already pushing manual expert assessments to their limits. »