Volunteer computers broaden climate model forecasts

Climate Researcher Dan Rowlands. Credit: Oxford University

Possible world temperatures in 2050 cover a wider range than previous official forecasts suggest, with the increase on the hotter side, scientists have said this week. That conclusion is based on a massive experiment, running 10,000 simulations using donated time on more than 30,000 computers through the climateprediction.net project. “The warming could be nearer to 3ºC rather than 2ºC higher than the average from 1961-1990 by 2050,” said Oxford University researcher Dan Rowlands.

Today, the most used predictions for future climate come from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The IPCC brought together models from around 20 of the best groups in the world doing research in this area in the Climate Model Intercomparison Project phase three, or CMIP3. But with such a small number of models, they couldn’t explore the range of future temperatures well.

“The IPCC knows this,” Rowlands told Simple Climate. “So, its uncertainty estimate is based on results from much simpler climate models. A lot of people have questioned whether they’re missing a lot of the key processes that might become important as the climate changes.”

But to predict what climate change will do to the world in detail, scientists need models like those used in CMIP3. “Say you’re looking at flooding in the UK in 2050, you need some meteorological drivers to put into your flood model from these large, complex, climate simulations,” Rowlands explained. “People in that field basically use the range from CMIP3, because that’s all that exists. We wanted to go out and challenge the uncertainty range of warming projected in CMIP3.”