Posted: May 7, 08 4:47pm
A quote or two from a current BBC article:
Professor Andrew Watson at the University of East Anglia researches carbon uptake in the oceans.
He fears dangerous climate change; but he told BBC News that basic science on the carbon cycle is too poorly understood to make a meaningful contribution to models.
"We have to try to model an immensely complex system all the way from the tropical rainforest, the oceans, the northern hemisphere forests, the soil - and we have no fundamental equations to do that with," he says.
"We just haven't had very good data for more than about six years pertaining to clouds," he says.
"And obviously climate change is a multi-decade or a century-timescale kind of thing.
"We would've needed really good cloud observations for the last 50 years to know how clouds affect climate."
"In terms of computing power, it's proving totally inadequate. With climate models we know how to make them much better to provide much more information at the local level... we know how to do that, but we don't have the computing power to deliver it."
