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"In the 70s they took up a large room and were less powerful than what's on your desk nowadays".

John Weatherly of the Army's Cold Regions Laboratory is talking about computers. He creates theoretical simulations on his computer using lots of data, past and present, to predict what the climate will be in the arctic and how it will affect the ice. Hi, I'm Bryan Yeaton and this is The Weather Notebook's weekly segment on global climate change.

Weatherly says that the development of climate science, forecasting, and studying the greenhouse effect goes hand in hand with the rise of super-computers.

JW: The largest computers finally became large enough that you wouldn't have to wait one or two lifetimes to wait for the result.

In today's digital landscape computers are faster, smaller, more powerful and networked together by the thousands to picture the climate in the next one hundred years. There's also more known, that is, data to feed into the models.

JW: We put in better physical representations of what goes on in the real world. I mean, how ice melts. How the ice moves across the ocean and how plants particularly grow in response and how they take up carbon dioxide.

The models aren't perfect. Predictions vary from a two to ten degree jump in temperature in the next few decades. That wide range poses a challenge to the public and to policy makers as to how to respond. Weatherly says the important thing is to focus on what is most likely and not the worst case scenario.

This series on global climate change is supported in part by the New England Science Center Collaborative and the Roy A. Hunt Foundation.