New paper finds climate models need another 5 to 50 years of research to predict impacts of climate change — Published in Environmental Research Letters
'A new paper finds that current climate models are not able to predict regional, seasonal temperature and precipitation changes and have huge 'mean errors between 1 and 18 °C.' Therefore, according to the authors, the models are especially unable to predict the impacts of regional temperature and precipitation changes. According to the authors, 'no single [climate model] matches observations in more than 30% of the areas for monthly precipitation and wet-day frequency, 50% for diurnal range and 70% for mean temperatures.' The majority of the IPCC AR4 report discusses the alleged regional impacts of climate change based on these same models, but according to the authors, the models won't be ready to predict the impacts of climate change for another 5 to 50 years, stating, 'we estimate that at least 5–30 years of [computer modeling research] is required to improve regional temperature simulations and at least 30–50 years for precipitation simulations, for these to be directly input into impact models.'
