Scott Denning PhD: Climate Models and Real World
March 3, 2022
Climate models have been uncannily accurate in projecting global temperature rise. James Hansen’s projections from 1981 are very close, even conservative, in predicting what we are seeing now.
But human beings don’t live in the world of smooth curves – and the unpredictable wiggles that arise in a warmed world are bringing disasters that most people are simply not prepared for.
Good example might be the Derecho event of December 2021, which ripped across the northern plains and spawned an unthinkable outbreak of Christmas Tornadoes.
Below, Daniel Swain points out that in a world that has already warmed, events are now possible that would once have been pure science fiction.
March 3, 2022 at 3:24 pm
There’s a very good reason the older models did a good job on casting what we’ve seen in the past. Climate change was small, ECS hadn’t changed much, the AO was still iced, permafrost hadn’t melted much, the Amazon was still a carbon sink, etc etc…. and so the simplified treatments in the models didn’t err much. That’s not true going forward. Don’t expect past is prologue. We’re transitioning from the smooth placid river to the white water….. hopefully not over the waterfall.