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Climate Modeling

Chapter Contents

Climate Modeling

  1. What Really Does a Climate Model Do?
  2. Climate Emissions Scenarios

Credits: Benjamin Brown-Steiner

Updates: Page last updated April 19, 2024

Image above: NASA (public domain) via Flickr

We depend on climate models and the people who run them for projections of future climate. These projections are critical for planning infrastructure projects, developing financial risk models that go into things like insurance rates, making real estate and farming decisions, and much more. This chapter explains how climate models work, what their inputs and outputs are, and the steps that scientists take to evaluate and verify their models.