More-severe climate model predictions could be the most accurate: study
Source: Phys.org
More-severe climate model predictions could be the most accurate: study
December 6, 2017
The climate models that project greater amounts of warming this century are the ones that best align with observations of the current climate, according to a new paper from Carnegie's Patrick Brown and Ken Caldeira published by Nature. Their findings suggest that the models used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, on average, may be underestimating future warming.
Climate model simulations are used to predict how much warming should be expected for any given increase in the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.
"There are dozens of prominent global climate models and they all project different amounts of global warming for a given change in greenhouse gas concentrations, primarily because there is not a consensus on how to best model some key aspects of the climate system," Brown explained.
Raw climate model results for a business-as-usual scenario indicate that we can expect global temperatures to increase anywhere in the range of 5.8 and 10.6 degrees Fahrenheit (3.2 to 5.9 degrees Celsius) over preindustrial levels by the end of the century—a difference of about a factor of two between the most- and least-severe projections.
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Read more: https://phys.org/news/2017-12-more-severe-climate-accurate.html
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Related: Greater future global warming inferred from Earth’s recent energy budget (Nature)
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