New Investment Needed to Power Critical Climate Modeling. By Roger Harrabin, BBC, May 6, 2008. "This week, about 150 of the world's top climate modelers have converged on [Reading University's Walker Institute in the UK] ]for a four-day meeting to plan a revolution in climate prediction. And they have plenty of work to do. So far modelers have failed to narrow the total bands of uncertainties since the first report of the [IPCC] in 1990. And [Professor] Julia Slingo from Reading University admitted it would not get much better until they had supercomputers 1,000 times more powerful than at present... 'We know how to [improve climate models to provide much more information at the local level], but we don't have the computing power to deliver it,' [she said]. Slingo said several hundred million pounds of investment were needed... 'It would allow us to tell the policymakers that they need to build the [Thames] barrier [for example] in the next 30 years, or maybe that they don't need to.' Some modelers are now warning that feedback mechanisms in the natural environment, which either accelerate or mitigate warming, may be even more difficult to predict than previously assumed. Research suggests the feedbacks may be very different on different timescales and in response to different drivers of climate change."
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