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Models
07/30/2002
Listen in RealAudio 
Hi, I'm Bryan Yeaton and this is the Weather Notebook's weekly segment on global
climate change. Are climate models reliable in predicting future climate scenarios?
We asked two researchers how much stock we should put in them. John Fyfe, a
climate modeler at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, weighs in
first:
John Fyfe: Are we becoming more confident in these models? I think the answer is
yes. We have to bear in mind that these models still are imperfect, though. There are
very important aspects of the climate system which we still don't understand. For
example, clouds. The horizontal resolution of these models is still relatively coarse,
and too coarse to resolve individual clouds, which, of course have scales of some tens
of kilometers. And so there are very important processes in the atmosphere that we
still can't represent in these models, and so we have lingering doubts, and have some
concerns with respect to the appropriateness of the predictions that these models
produce.
Andrew Weaver, Fyfe's colleague at the Canadian Centre for Climate Modeling and
Analysis, says the models are saying the same thing.
Andrew Weaver: There are very sophisticated models, there are less sophisticated
models. There's back-of-the-envelope calculations. All of them say the same thing! I
don't think there's any danger of putting in too much faith in model projections. I think
there's a danger of going along for years and saying, oh, scientific uncertainty, scientific
uncertainty. Well, that's science, right? Science is about uncertainty. I mean, science is
always about reducing the uncertainties, finding new knowledge; about finding new
ways of things working. And to not do action simply because the science is uncertain is
like sticking your head in the ground and saying nothing is happening.
Thanks today to correspondent Dave Kattenberg of Brandon, Manitoba. Our series on
global climate change is supported by the New England Science Center Collaborative
and the Roy A. Hunt foundation.
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