Predicting Our Climate Future: What We Know, What We Don’t Know, and What We Can’t Know

The best climate models gives us only partial, indeterminate, and often misleading glimpses of how the planet will warm, according to this knotty debut treatise. Stainforth, a physicist at the London School of Economics and Political Science, contends that though the “robust” science on human-caused climate change is settled, difficulties remain in designing models capable of predicting how global warming will unfold. Climatologists, he explains, create complex, labyrinthine computer simulations that take millions of variables into account but sometimes generate wildly different outcomes depending on slight tweaks to their input parameters, raising questions about their validity. Scientists also fine-tune models by testing their ability to replicate past climate data, a practice that will likely lead to increasingly inaccurate results as the globe suffers from more unprecedented weather events. Unfortunately, Stainforth’s belabored analogies do little to elucidate the science (he likens the uncertainty of data points in climate simulations to not knowing whether one is in France or Italy when embarking on a road trip to the Netherlands), and general readers’ eyes will glaze over at the technical discussions of “macro-initial conditions” and the probability distributions represented in the volume’s bountiful graphs and charts. This is best suited for specialists. Photos. (Jan.)