Send more funds: Earth system models are missing key piece of future climate puzzle, researchers say

Alaskan permafrost: [image credit: insideclimatenews.org]

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Alaskan permafrost: [image credit: insideclimatenews.org]

The ’emissions’ obsessives of climate research seek greater financing for the endless quest for evidence that might support their theories. The subject here is permafrost, but it also reads like an admission that climate is more complicated than current models can cope with, for a number of reasons.
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The way science is funded is hampering Earth system models, and may be skewing important climate predictions, according to a new comment published in Nature Climate Change by Woodwell Climate Research Center and an international team of model experts, says Phys.org.

Emissions from thawing permafrost, frozen ground in the North that contains twice as much carbon as the atmosphere does and is thawing due to human-caused climate warming [Talkshop comment – the usual empty assertion], are one of the largest uncertainties in future climate projections.

But accurate representation of permafrost dynamics is missing from the major models that project future carbon emissions.

Only two of the eleven Earth system models (ESMs) used in the last Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report include permafrost carbon cycling at all, and those that do currently use over-simplified approximations that don’t capture the fully dynamic ways that permafrost carbon can be released into the atmosphere as the climate warms.

Processes that researchers have observed in the field, such as the way abrupt permafrost thaw can create ponds and lakes and change surface hydrology, run counter to these approximations but have large implications for permafrost carbon and its potential impact on the global climate.

“What happens to the carbon in permafrost is one of the biggest unknowns about our future climate,” said Christina Schaedel, senior research scientist at Woodwell Climate Research Center and lead author of the report. “Earth system models are critical to predicting where, how and when this carbon will be released, but modeling teams currently don’t have the resources they need to depict permafrost accurately. If we want more accurate climate predictions, that needs to change.”
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“Our understanding of how permafrost is thawing and emitting carbon has drastically improved over the last 15 years,” said Brendan Rogers, associate scientist at Woodwell Climate Research Center and co-lead of the Permafrost Pathways project. “Funding Earth system models to represent permafrost thaw would ensure those gains are realized in the models, and that critical climate targets and carbon budgets are being based on the best science we have.”

Full article here.