But people most familiar with how the climate system behaved in the past -- before humans came along to alter the composition of its atmosphere -- see patterns of natural change that are fundamentally different from what the biggest, most complex models project for the future.
Remarkably, the character of this "disconnect" between geological data of the past and computer simulations of the future is not at all what people who complain about climate science and climate scientists would have us believe.
"The models seem to be too stable," Paul Valdes, a climate modeler and "paleoclimate" specialist at the University of Bristol in the UK, argues in the new issue of the journal Nature Geoscience.
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Judging from the evidence, Earth's climate is more sensitive than the computer models designed to simulate its behavior.
Thousands of years of climates past are punctuated by episodes of change that are rapid and radical -- big, sudden shifts in temperature and precipitation. This inclination toward "abrupt climate change" -- found in ice cores, ocean sediments and other geological data -- surprised earth scientists as it was uncovered in the 1990s, and still it remains outside of much conventional thinking on the subject.
Valdes argues that the models used by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in its most recent report (2007) "have not proved their ability to simulate abrupt change when a critical threshold is crossed." Read the full report here.
Source: by John D. Cox, Discovery News.
