What exactly goes into making a model of climate change, and what factors influence their accuracy?
I imagine accurate measurements of previous climate conditions, from things like ice cores, and accurate measurements of current weather conditions, are very important– what else is there? Climate models are the progeny of computer models, first developed in the 1950s, to predict the weather. Weather and climate models solve the equations that govern the motion of the atmosphere (F = ma) and its heating and cooilng (1st law of thermodynamics). These are differential equations, which means they have derivatives with respect to space and time. In computer models, these derivatives are represented discretely, on a mesh of gridpoints. A climate model has to include the ocean, as well as the atmosphere, and modern climate models represent the ocean in much the same way as they do the atmosphere. This much is relatively straightforward (if complicated in practice). The techniques for solving equations on computers are well developed, and, as computers get faster and faster, the mesh of grid
