Consensus reports shed light on climate change
Still image from an animated climate model. One model, by itself, only presents one piece of the climate puzzle. According to Isaac Held, the big picture comes from organizations such as the NAS or IPCC, which make reports based on findings from thousands of scientists.
JB: This is Earth & Sky. One of the most powerful tools in the scientist’s tool bag is the computer model.
DB: These models are what let scientists understand and predict future climate change. The models incorporate past and current conditions: things like the observed distribution of clouds and the rising temperature of the sea surface. That information plus a computer lets scientists simulate possible future changes.
JB: But, notoriously, computer models developed and used by different scientists can disagree. How do you know who to believe? Isaac Held at NOAA’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory works with climate models. He suggested looking to organizing bodies – such as the National Academy of Sciences and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – for the most accurate predictions of future climate. Their reports incorporate the findings of thousands of scientists.
Isaac Held: The consensus isn’t always right, but it’s just the best we can do given our present information is to take a measure of the consensus of the scientific community.
DB: Held said that these sort of consensus reports are particularly useful to policy makers. We have links to some consensus reports about ongoing and future climate change at earthsky.org. Our thanks to NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. We’re Block and Byrd for Earth & Sky..
Read the IPCC’s reports for policy makers.
Read the National Academy of Science’s searchable collection on global warming/ climate change.
As an example of how climate models can disagree, Earth & Sky recently spoke to climate scientists who predicted both a wetter and drier future for Africa’s Sahel region based on different models.
Our thanks to:
Isaac Held
Senior Research Scientist
Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
Additional Teacher Resources
NASA: Educational Global Climate Modeling
The Educational Global Climate Modeling Project develops and distributes a research-quality global climate model (GCM) with a user-friendly interface that runs on desktop computers. Anyone can explore the subject of climate change using the same methods and tools that scientists employ.
NOAA: Global Warming and Hurricanes
The goal of this research is to expand the scientific understanding of the physical processes that govern the behavior of the atmosphere and the oceans as complex fluid systems. These systems can then be modeled mathematically and their phenomenology can be studied by computer simulation methods.
