An international team of climate scientists suggests that research centers around the world using numerical models to predict future climate change should include simulations of past climates in their evaluation and statement of their model performance.
Paleoclimate context for future climate scenarios. Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs) are scenarios of projected socioeconomic global changes up to 2100. These are shown alongside different paleoclimates from the past 100 million years. Global mean surface temperature and CO2 (grey line and error in shading) are estimated for the past 100 million years from proxy data. Temperature colors are scaled relative to preindustrial conditions. Blue bars indicate when there are well-developed ice sheets (solid lines) and intermittent ice sheets (dashed lines), according to previous syntheses studies. From Jessica E. Tierney et al., Past climates inform our future, Science, Nov. 6, 2020. DOI: 10.1126/science.aay3701.
Read the whole article on the Department of Meteorology’s website.
