Climate ModelingImagine you have the responsibility of estimating the temperature of the Earth in 10, 20 or even 50 years from now. How would you go about doing that?
If you were a mathematician who understood the physics related to heat transfer, the movements of air and water, that is oceans, the formation of snow and steam, the composition of the elements of atmosphere including their molecular structure, the methods by which molecules transfer energy you could perhaps develop a model that had the ability to do this forecasting. Such forecasting would include the structure of continents, the interaction of the earth with air at all levels of the atmosphere, the impact of man made cities and other constructs including roads, agriculture and deforesting on all of these. Your model would look like a Giant weather forecast looking at the whole Earth and the atmosphere that would be representative of what they would all look like 50 years from now.The models would also need to take a hard look at the way human beings are using the spaces around the planet.
Carbon brief .org has a description of the latest climate models including that which was used to generate the most recent IPCC report. We are not going to delve further into these models here but we refer you to organizations that have developed General Circulation Models that are used to model the Earth’s climate.
The best source of these is through the IPCC, that is the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change which is the United Nations body for assessing the science related to climate change.
In their recently published AR6 Synthesis Report they conclude:
Human activities, principally through emissions of greenhouse gases, have unequivocally caused global warming, with global surface temperature reaching 1.1°C above 1850–1900 in 2011–2020. Global greenhouse gas emissions have continued to increase, with unequal historical and ongoing contributions arising from unsustainable energy use, land use and land-use change, lifestyles and patterns of consumption and production across regions, between and within countries, and among individuals (high confidence).