New climate metrics for new climate conversations

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Kris de Meyer, director of the Climate Action Unit at UCL, thinks we do. His team has spent the last year developing a prototype of a new climate dashboard which is inspired by the R-number. The dashboard, which brings together the causes of climate change, the rate at which it's happening, and the impacts that it's having on our weather systems, is designed to offer journalists and other science communicators a set of tools to tell stories about the changes that humans are making to the planet, and how they’re linked to the experiences people have in their day-to-day lives.

It does this in just three numbers. “The first metric is the Earth's energy imbalance and that is the primary driver of climate change,” de Meyer explains. “It's the difference between the amount of energy coming into the Earth system from the Sun, and the amount of energy that the Earth radiates back into space. We're losing some heat into space, but there's a constant stream of energy arriving from the Sun.”

If climate change wasn’t happening, that number would be hovering around zero, meaning that the amount of energy coming in and the amount going out is more or less equal. Unfortunately, human activity has pushed it out of balance. “We're adding more energy to the Earth's system than we're losing back into space, which means that the Earth is storing that energy and that energy is leading to all sorts of downstream changes in weather,” explains de Meyer.

The second metric is the speed at which the Earth is warming, expressed as the number of degrees per decade. “The reason why we picked the speed of warming is because it tells us something about what is happening to global temperatures, or regional temperatures, right now,” says de Meyer. He argues that the traditional climate metric of how much warmer the Earth is than during the pre-industrial period hides the real pace of change. “Most of the 1.2 degrees that we've had has been happening in the last 40 years alone,” he says.

Finally, the third metric featured in the dashboard ties directly into people’s experiences - it’s an index of the ‘unusualness’ of the weather we’re experiencing. “Every event where the temperature is being broken is being counted and then compared to the amount of these record-breaking temperatures that we would have if climate change wasn't happening,” de Meyer explains.

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