Friday, October 08, 2004

Climate, hurricanes, and computer models

Computer models predict stronger hurricanes as the climate warms. Does that mean it's going to be so?

Computer models are necessarily incomplete. They model some of the physics of the system, but some of the physics is still too complicated to model with the computer power available. And, of course, computer models can't model anything we don't know yet.

Before we rely on a climate model's prediction, we should see more details about how well the models retrodict. Given data for any time in the past, how well does the model's prediction match what actualy happened?

If a model manages to create a good match with the weather we actually got, then it might be worth looking at the weather it thinks we may get. If there's no match, then why are we paying any attention to its predictions?

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