Changes that occur in the atmosphere occur in three dimensions. That should come as no surprise, even with the wrap-up last week of Climate Week NYC. Yet so much thinking on climate change happens on a two-dimensional level.
Certainly, academic and government studies delve into the dimensional complexity of the airy environment, but the study results seem to be delivered and interpreted in a simplistic way.
Take climate conclusions derived from the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report. The IPCC report is the bible of climate change collective wisdom, and its latest edition is the Sixth Assessment Report (AR6).
Image created using AI.
The synthesis of the full, lengthy report to AR6 was released in March 2023. And although there are thousands of pages of mainly technical material, including peer-reviewed references in the full multi-year state-of-the-science AR6, the relatively brief synthesis is typically heavily influenced by politics, highlighting the “I,” or Inter-governmental portion, of the IPCC.
From the skewed IPCC synthesis reports and similar politically biased narratives, many in the public, politicians, and news media conclude:
The Earth’s air temperature is rising to dangerous levels; this rise is mainly due to increasing levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Therefore, the release of carbon dioxide by burning fossil fuels must end as soon as possible. Otherwise, without cessation of fossil fuel use, much of life on Earth will die.
Some form of this “settled science” diatribe has been repeated almost ad nauseum for decades. Schooling from K-16 and into graduate education has been saturated with this mantra. Yet the reality of atmospheric science is far from this “two-dimensional” thinking. What is actually known is not so simple nor settled.
Like the air itself, a third dimension must be added to common climate-change thinking. This third dimension is the depth of the atmosphere.
This expanded, three-dimensional perspective derives from atmospheric modeling, which is used to explore the dynamics of the global air and to forecast its future conditions. But even sophisticated mathematical climate modeling still lacks sufficient equations to match actual climate conditions.
The mismatch between modeled and actual conditions is recognized in A Critical Review of Impacts of Greenhouse Gas Emissions on the U.S. Climate, a July 2025 US Department of Energy document by a well-qualified, five-member Climate Working Group. Although this document is currently being contested, its section on the “Vertical temperature profile mismatch” notes that “[t]he atmosphere’s temperature profile is a case where [climate] models are not merely uncertain but also show a common warming bias relative to observations. This suggests that they misrepresent certain fundamental feedback processes.”
My own peer-reviewed research confirms that changes in the lowest layer of the Earth’s air defy “incontrovertible” conclusions. I recently produced a 30-year (1991 - 2020) climatology of low-level temperature conditions derived from southwest Pennsylvania twice-daily balloon-launch data. My study investigated atmospheric changes that impact the dispersal of air pollutants near the ground.
Yet these changes also relate directly to climate change mechanics because changes to the trends in near-surface temperature, along with moisture content, have a profound effect on the Earth’s hydrologic (water) cycle.
Notably, perhaps the most uncertain of the feedback processes mentioned in the Critical Review is related to the water cycle.
Water in all its forms—as solid ice and snow, as liquid cloud droplets, precipitation, and fog, and as invisible vapor—continuously cycles its modes and in the process absorbs or releases energy. Water vapor and clouds account for most of the greenhouse effect.
In the recent book Climate and Energy: The Case for Realism, one of the Critical Review authors, climatologist Dr. Roy Spencer, noted that precipitation processes that restrict the accumulation of water vapor in the atmosphere “are not known in enough detail to predict how the weak direct-warming effect of [carbon dioxide] will be either amplified or reduced by precipitation limits on water vapor. Climate models only crudely represent the conversion from water vapor to precipitation... The actual physics that will determine how precipitation will change with warming are not even understood, let alone represented in climate models.”
Clearly, there is still a lot to be investigated about the workings of the atmosphere. And nuanced science must continue to be disseminated and understood, regardless of Climate Week’s politicized storylines that assert two-dimensional simplicity to the three-dimensional complexity of the climate.
Anthony J. Sadar is a Certified Consulting Meteorologist and an adjunct associate professor of science at Geneva College, Beaver Falls, PA. He is also co-author of Environmental Risk Communication: Principles and Practices for Industry (CRC Press).