Top climate scientists have admitted they failed to predict the intensity of the German floods and the North American heat dome.
They’ve correctly warned over decades that a fast-warming climate would bring worse bursts of rain and more damaging heatwaves.
But they say their computers are not powerful enough to accurately project the severity of those extremes.
They want governments to spend big on a shared climate super-computer.
Computers are fundamental to weather forecasting and climate change, and computing will underpin the new climate science “Bible”, from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) next month.
But former Met Office chief scientist Prof Dame Julia Slingo told the BBC: “We should be alarmed because the IPCC [climate computer] models are just not good enough.
“[We need] an international centre to deliver the quantum leap to climate models that capture the fundamental physics that drive extremes.
“Unless we do that we will continue to underestimate the intensity/frequency of extremes and the increasingly unprecedented nature of them.”
Source: BBC
