The Great Climate Model

Climate Change, Anthropocene, & Associated Issues

Date posted: 10/14/14

Dr. Conca reports that we really need a more robust climate model that can capture the details we want to predict what will happen to us over the next hundred years. Our present models just are not up to the task. We need a Great Climate Model. The National Laboratories of the Department of Energy are working on just such a model. Teamed with the National Center for Atmospheric Research, four academic institutions and one private company to form the Accelerated Climate Modeling for Energy, or ACME project, the national labs will help develop the most complete, fully coupled, state-of-the-science Earth system model to date. The rate of temperature change is pretty fast this time and we are heading to be warmer than at any point in this long period of glaciations. The number of species that go extinct is a direct function of the rate at which the temperature changes. So we should be very, very concerned since the rate of change going on now is dramatic even for the big kill times in the distant past. Remember the last ten thousand years on the graph is really stretched out, so it looks flatter. And it does not matter if this present temperature change is human induced or not. We need to understand it and we need to deal with it. Of course, it is never black or white, and the warming effects appear to be a human-exacerbated natural trend. But if there is anything we can do, we need to know what that is.