This week some of the world’s most eminent climate scientists have been attending a little get-together in Reading (yes really) with the snappy title of the World Modelling Summit for Climate Prediction. Their aspirations, as described on the official conference website, are quite modest:
The underlying goal of the summit is no less than to prepare a blueprint to launch a revolution in climate prediction.
http://wcrp.ipsl.jussieu.fr/Workshops/ModellingSummit/Background.html
Now this surely is something that we should all applaud. If one had to pick a single area of climate science that has contributed most towards convincing policy makers and the public that our planet faces a deadly peril from anthropogenic climate change, then the output from models would be a very obvious candidate. It is these vastly complex programs, run on the world’s most powerful supercomputers, which warn of rising temperature trends during the rest of this century.
Observed temperature change over the last hundred-and-fifty years is not really that scary (see here), but predictions from models, lovingly featured in IPCC reports, are definitely not for the faint-hearted. The problem is that these are just predictions; estimates of what may happen if a lot of assumptions about the way that the climate works are right. We will have no way of telling whether they come even close to the truth for decades. Continue reading »
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