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e-Science

A new way to model the climate

Climate models predict significant changes to the Earth's climate in the coming century. But there is a huge range in what they predict. If they are over-estimating the speed and scale of climate change, we may end up panicking unnecessarily and investing huge amounts of money trying to avert a problem which doesn't turn out to be as serious as the models suggested. Alternatively, if the models are under-estimating the change, we will end up doing too little, too late in the mistaken belief that the changes will be manageably small and gradual.

To cope with this problem we need to evaluate our confidence in climate model predictions. In other words we need to quantify the uncertainty in these predictions. By participating in the experiment, people from around the world have helped us to do this in a way that would not otherwise be possible.

Climate models have to include the effects of small-scale physical processes, such as clouds. There are many possible ways these can develop leading to many possible impacts on the global and regional climate. Our current high speed super computers just can't analyse so many minute processes and variables. With distributed computing, each computer tackles one small but key part of the global problem. By enabling so many model simulations to be performed, participants in climateprediction.net have enabled the team to explore the effects of varying the values of approximately thirty key model parameters.

The results show a range of climate responses to increased atmospheric carbon dioxide and also indicate that uncertainties in the model physics can combine in unpredictable ways to broaden this range.