Climate predictions: the influence of nonlinearity and randomness

Copyright © 2012 The Royal SocietyJournal ArticleThe current threat of global warming and the public demand for confident projections of climate change pose the ultimate challenge to science: predicting the future behaviour of a system of such overwhelming complexity as the Earth's climate. This Theme Issue addresses two practical problems that make even prediction of the statistical properties of the climate, when treated as the attractor of a chaotic system (the weather), so challenging. The first is that even for the most detailed models, these statistical properties of the attractor show systematic biases. The second is that the attractor may undergo sudden large-scale changes on a time scale that is fast compared with the gradual change of the forcing (the so-called climate tipping)