Climate Change Lesson 7 : Climate Models Making Global Predictions

Predicting climate change involves atmospheric processes which are hard to see, for a planetary system, when changes from year to year can be so gradual that they are hard to perceive. It is no wonder that people are skeptical about climate change. If seeing is believing, then climate change for a global system is hard to believe because it can’t easily be seen.

This lesson is about climate modeling, how it is done, why it is necessary, and how models are tested. The goal of this unit has been to help students understand the components that go into a building a climate model which makes predictions about the future that policy makers, businesses and individuals will depend on. The goal of this lesson is to give students a basic understanding of how scientists model a complex system.

Environmental observations are the foundation for understanding the climate system. From the bottom of the ocean to the surface of the Sun, instruments on weather stations, buoys, satellites, and other platforms all collect climate data. This unit has worked to help students understand ways that have been developed to collect data about the present and the past, and the basic physics of the movement of energy and matter in the earth-ocean-atmosphere system.

Observations, experiments, and theory are used to construct and refine computer models that represent the climate system and make predictions about its future behavior. Climate models are one of the most computationally intense activities of any scientific research. Along with the complexity of climate models there is a tremendous possibility for error, so repeated testing is critical. The reading on climate models will both explain the reasons for the complexity of the models, and also show how important the data from the past has been to provide a base for testing the models.