Explore a climate model

What can we do?

Test the interactive climate model and answer. Click on the illustrations on this page and enlarge them. It will help you to find the right settings for the model.

Now we need to find out what we have to do in order to give recommendations to policy makers. Click for this purpose on the "mitigation" button and choose the option: "Stabilise CO₂ emissions". You can choose yourself now with the big cross in the CO₂ emissions in which decade we reduce our emissions in the world and what the consequences are for CO₂ levels, temperature and climate. If you think we will not manage to stabilise our emissions so soon, follow the scheme below and type in the amount and year by hand.
 

Task 9: What are the emissions in 2000? By how much do we have to reduce in order to keep our climate under control? Estimate a value.

The following result is for 1200 Gt C per year in 2200:
 

We see that we can make a lot of assumptions about the development of our world which lead to different outcomes for a future climate. However, differences are not only in the estimations on emissions and other conditions in our world. There are, meanwhile, 15 different global climate models developed in different institutes, which use different mathematical equations and couplings in order to describe the climate system. If you click on the button GCM fit (arrow in yellow) you can compare for a few models what the results would be.

Task 10: Give in 5-6 sentences a final statement: What can we learn from climate models? Why do they show different results? Do you think we should wait until models show better agreement before we change our behaviour?