The more we know about climate change the more uncertain our models become — and if scientists are not to lose the trust of the public they need to explain this, a senior climatologist has said.
Mark Maslin, a former director of the UCL Environment Institute, was speaking at The Times Cheltenham Science Festival before publication of a commentary in Nature.
He said that the next Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, in 2014, was likely to produce a greater range of projections than the previous one, and that this increasing fuzziness was an inevitable consequence of better calculations.
In one case the uncertainty means that forecasts of the future flow of the Mekong river as a consequence of climate change range from