Climate models

Climate models are still in an underdeveloped state. Though, in five to ten years from now, there is a potential that the situation changes, some scientists predict.

Let us look at the issue closer.
In the physorg news last month, a few statements of Mahowald and Hess raise my attention. "Models of the physical climate that attempt to predict how the interaction of land, atmosphere, and oceans will determine future temperature and weather have not traditionally included the carbon cycle - how carbon moves between land, air, water, and living things. [...] Many models also have simplified computation by treating the atmosphere as two-dimensional."
"The new round of "fully coupled 3-D" climate models for the next Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report will include modeling of the entire carbon cycle, including predictions of the amount of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide (CO2) that will be present in the atmosphere. This requires understanding how vegetation and ocean productivity respond to climate change," Mahowald points out.
"The models still need refinement and must be compared with improved measurements in the field" - Mahowald points out. "You put in your best guess of how something works, and then you have to revise. The basic predictions of climate change are based on very simple models, but we need to develop and refine these more elaborate models to make the predictions more precise." - Hess explains.
Mahowald concludes that "in five or ten years we'll have models we can trust much more".

The finding given on another thread highlights "the importance of representing ice clouds properly in models, which is important to the success of the next generation of climate models and their ability to predict future climate."
In another post I mentioned the supercomputing resources, which together with the technology advance allows the next generation of climate models for running at much finer spatial resolutions (less than 10 km). "This finer resolution permits the representation of cloud-sized phenomenon such as thunderstorms. At such high resolutions, the information gained from traditional larger-scale climate model resolutions may be invalid. These next- generation climate models will rely heavily on newer, more sophisticated means of representing clouds."

It sounds that the growth (whether it is exponential or not) of many technologies, different phenomena, or even separate events contribute to the development of climate models.

I had the privilege to talk to Stanford Professor Chris Field last summer. He is the leading member of the Nobel-Peace-Prize winning IPCC report from 2007.

Here is an interesting interview on his climate-change view.
He says: "The idea is that we’ve used climate models to explore possible futures. We characterize economic growth rates, population, kinds of ways that energy is generated, and use those to say, well, what might CO2 emissions be going into the future? And that’s what the climate models run."
He and Post Graduate Fellow Scott Loarie survey Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve and talk how the
"Climate Change Puts Ecosystems on the Run".

Then, not all climatologists agree with the IPCC forecast as elaborated in the video.

So, what is the conclusion?
If we want to make a real forecast that holds reliable attributes, we need to advance the methods of computation in the micro- and macro-scale perspectives. To that end, the modeling techniques as such should be further investigated. Finally, we need to integrate, all those sciences, data, knowledge, starting from the Earth systems, to the computational approaches, engineering, and software development.

All that should be considered in a global dimension.
Whether we manage it in 10 years... it is, indeed, just the matter of time and commitment, the time scale is doubtful to me, though.

Take a look into Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto by Steward Brand (October 15, 2009) to know more.