Climate models of the past, present and future seem to be in no short supply these days. But a new and dynamic picture of climate change appears in this week’s Science, one that could affect the way future conditions are predicted.
Recent history has been kind to humans, providing a relatively stable climate for about the past 10,000 years. Many previous models have re-created short glimpses of this past.
But, says Axel Timmermann, a professor of oceanography at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, “None of these snapshots were able to capture abrupt climate change and transition,” thereby making them less useful for predicting coming sudden shifts. Even if the near future doesn’t unfold like the 2004 climate-gone-haywire film The Day After Tomorrow, scientists need to be able to produce accurate models of what abrupt change (more likely spanning hundreds or thousands or years, rather than days) would look like and why it might occur, explains Zhengyu Liu, lead author of the study and director of the University of Wisconsinâ??Madison’s Center for Climate Research.