It is difficult to make predictions, especially about the future, as the saying goes. However, there’s important science to be done trying to reduce those uncertainties for life in the ocean. We have a new paper out today in the ICES Journal of Marine Science to chart that course, from a collaboration with William Cheung and a wonderful group of colleagues in the Nereus program, “Building confidence in projections of the responses of living marine resources to climate change.”
This figure shows three of the key sources of uncertainty in any projection, using sea surface temperature as an example: the model used to make the projection (blue), the climate change scenario followed (green), and irreducible variability in the model (orange). The graph shows how natural variability dominates over the next couple decades, but the scenario of greenhouse gas emissions is very important by the end of the century.
