There’s Good Climate And Bad Climate News: An Astrophysicist Explains

InnovationScienceThere’s Good Climate And Bad Climate News: An Astrophysicist ExplainsByAdam Frank,Contributor.Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. Adam Frank is an astrophysicist exploring our place in the Cosmos.Follow AuthorJun 12, 2026, 08:00am EDTO (Photo by Lukas Schulze/Getty Images)Getty ImagesHuman beings are an extraordinary successful species. We went from having less than million of us (all in Africa) a few hundred thousand years ago to now covering the globe at 8 billion strong. But all that success comes with a price. The energy we’ve harvested from the planet (mostly in the form of stored solar energy i.e. fossil fuels) has changed the atmosphere and is now pushing the climate system into an uncharted direction. Climate change poses considerable risks for the future (just ask any insurance company). The magnitude of that risk is something scientists having been trying to figure out for a few decades. Over the last year or so we’ve got some good news and some bad news on the climate front. Today I wanted to briefly walk you through both.Let’s start with the good news (and thank the gods for any good news about anything these days). In a paper published just a few weeks ago, scientists found that the most worst-case scenario they’d been using in their studies can be taken off the table. So what exactly does that mean? In order to standardize their modeling, over the last couple of decades climate scientists developed a suite of projections for how much CO2 would get dumped into the atmosphere via fossil fuel use. Since CO2 is the greenhouse gas we care about most for climate change, each of these scenarios would then get fed into climate models. The models were then used to predict what Earth would look like by the year 2100. It was like scientist’s had a menu of future human fossil fuel to use in their models. That’s where the good news comes from. The most extreme fossil fuel future - which led to the most extreme clim...