Modeling Climate Change

NASA Climate Scientist Gavin Schmidt (credit: Williams College)

The effects of climate change can be observed on different scales from the micro, like to phytoplankton in the oceans, and also to the macro, such as global weather systems and everywhere in between. So how do you accurately connect all these levels of complexity so they tell a complete story? That is the challenge of crafting climate models.

NASA scientist Gavin Schmidt says you can't understand climate change piecemeal but only as a whole. As data becomes increasingly available from environmental, physical, and biological studies the climate change models, developed in the 1980's, continue becoming more exact in their predictions and real-world observations. The issue then becomes how do properly utilize them?

Schmidt of Williams College in Massachusetts explains in an audience presentation. WHB

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