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Short-term tests validate long-term estimates of climate change

Six-hour weather forecasts have been used to validate estimates of climate change hundreds of years from now. Such tests have great potential — but only if our weather-forecasting and climate-prediction systems are unified.
  1. Tim Palmer

    1. Tim Palmer is in the Department of Physics, University of Oxford, Oxford OX1 3PU, UK.

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How sensitive is climate to atmospheric carbon dioxide levels? For a doubling of CO2 concentration from pre-industrial levels, some models predict an alarming long-term warming of more than 5 °C. But are these estimates believable? Writing in the Journal of Advances in Modeling Earth Systems, Williams et al.1 have tested some of the revisions that have been made to one such model by assessing its accuracy for very short-term weather forecasts. The results are not reassuring — they support the estimates.

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Nature 582, 185-186 (2020)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-020-01484-5

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