No. We know with certainty that our emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) have increased the amount of this gas in the atmosphere by one third. Today, its concentration is far higher than it has been in the last 650,000 years – that’s how far back we have reliable data from ice samples taken from boreholes in Antarctica. It has been known since the 19th century and is now proven that CO2 acts as a greenhouse gas and heats up the world’s climate.

The greatest dangers for us as humans lie in extreme weather events: heat waves, increasing droughts, strong precipitation that leads to flooding and more intense storm tides along coasts due to the increase in sea level, which is currently rising by three centimetres per decade.

Highly unpredictable risks exist – above all, as a result of accelerating ice melt from Greenland and the western Antarctic. This has been increasingly observed in recent years, but because of the long time it takes to produce IPCC reports it has not yet been fully taken into account. Additionally, it is becoming evident that the mathematical models we use for making future projections have significantly underestimated the sea level rise that has already occurred over the last decades.

We already have many technologies that would enable us to work at far higher levels of efficiency and with a fraction of current CO2 emissions; moreover, we can also develop new technologies. Economic analyses, such as the report by former World Bank economist Nicholas Stern, have shown that consistent climate protection is much cheaper than simply carrying on with old technology and then having to pay for climate damage later. What has been missing until now is the political will to implement the necessary climate policy turnaround. After all, that will not come about by itself.

Ultimately, climate research remains a very small field with a rather modest number of researchers. The resources available are not appropriate to the scale of the problem. Today, even if we are certain in the knowledge that carbon dioxide is increasing the global temperature, many pressing problems remain unsolved, for example, the question of the risk of “surprises” in the system – in other words, of abrupt, strongly non-linear changes – or the question of the stability of the large continental ice sheets. Although as researchers we would naturally like to conduct even more research, what is now even more urgent than more climate research is the solution to the problem.

Interview: Joachim Wille