Posted: 6/17/2013 11:46:26 AM EDT
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// Climate Models ///
<3111> Watson/UEA: I'd agree probably 10 years away to go from weather forecasting to ~ annual scale. But the "big climate picture" includes ocean feedbacks on all time scales, carbon and other elemental cycles, etc. and it has to be several decades before that is sorted out I would think. So I would guess that it will not be models or theory, but observation that will provide the answer to the question of how the climate will change in many decades time. <5131> Shukla/IGES: ["Future of the IPCC", 2008] It is inconceivable that policymakers will be willing to make billion-and trillion-dollar decisions for adaptation to the projected regional climate change based on models that do not even describe and simulate the processes that are the building blocks of climate variability. <2423> Lanzante/NOAA: While perhaps one could designate some subset of models as being poorer in a lot of areas, there probably never will be a single universally superior model or set of models. We should keep in mind that the climate system is complex, so that it is difficult, if not impossible to define a metric that captures the breath of physical processes relevant to even a narrow area of focus. <1982> Santer: there is no individual model that does well in all of the SST and water vapor tests we've applied. <0850> Barnett: [IPCC AR5 models] clearly, some tuning or very good luck involved. I doubt the modeling world will be able to get away with this much longer <5066> Hegerl: [IPCC AR5 models] So using the 20th c for tuning is just doing what some people have long suspected us of doing [...] and what the nonpublished diagram from NCAR showing correlation between aerosol forcing and sensitivity also suggested. <4443> Jones: Basic problem is that all models are wrong - not got enough middle and low level clouds. <4085> Jones: GKSS is just one model and it is a model, so there is no need for it to be correct. |