What is climate modeling?
Climate modeling is science’s attempt to try and understand the earth’s complex climate system and all its inherent processes. Arguably its most important roles are to discern whether anthropogenic forcing is responsible for the current global warming trend and to predict future increases in the earth’s average temperature as green house gas emissions continue to rise. This is accomplished using mathematics as well as computational analyses. Because the earth’s climate system is a complex entity, complicated equations and algorithms representing the multitude of factors that play a part in the energy flow in the system are needed. The atmosphere, the oceans, the cryosphere (ice covered regions), land surface (including vegetation) and wildlife all need to be taken into consideration. Then one needs to take into account the transfer of energy through processes such as convection, condensation, evaporation, reflection and radiation. Finally one needs to input data concerning the green ho
