Climate Modeling Quotes

Climate is what we expect, weather is what we get.

If you have a temperature rise, if it's a problem in one area, it's beneficial in another area. But sea level is the real 'bad guy,' and therefore they [The IPCC] have talked very much about it. But the real thing is, that [sea level rise] doesn't exist in observational data, only in computer modeling.

Neptune's unusual behavior is showing us that though we can make great models of planetary atmospheric circulation, there may be key pieces missing.

The basic science is very well established; it is well understood that global warming is due to greenhouse gases. What is uncertain is projections about specifics in the next few decades, by how much will the climate change.

Would people cheat on climate science? Sure. Because all it is a model into which there are 2,000 variables, and if I want this outcome, I nudge that one up a little and down a little bit, and there you go.

One can't predict the weather more than a few days in advance.

In the end, climate change is a math problem.

The climate is changing; I don't think you can deny that. But climate has always changed.

It's a pretty widely-accepted notion that the atmosphere is a ridiculously complex system, and the best we can do with our models is a rough approximation.

It makes very little sense to believe the output of the climate models.

You could engineer a human to survive the greenhouse effect because you think that's what's going to happen, and then all of a sudden the glaciers are creeping down on you.

When I took over the ministry for science and technology, our weather systems were in shambles. Nobody believed in the IMD. Nothing was in digital mode. I changed all that. We got automatic rain gauges, automatic weather stations, Doppler radars.

We see something change in our climate and we blame ourselves ... I don't think we understand what happens. We can watch it happen on the (climate) models, we know it happens, but we don't know for sure how it happens.

Infected by political ideology, if you dare question climate models, your career is done.

Computer models of the climate....[are] a very dubious business if you don't have good inputs.

Man-made global warming was a potential serious threat, and NASA wanted Congress to fund new satellites to study the problem. It was a team effort to get that accomplished.

Being at NASA and having the access to both computing capability and satellite observation capability is kind of the ideal research situation to try to understand global climate change.

Contrary to popular accounts, very few scientists in the world - possibly none - have a sufficiently thorough, 'big picture' understanding of the climate system to be relied upon for a prediction of the magnitude of global warming. To the public, we all might seem like experts, but the vast majority of us work on only a small portion of the problem.

The climate is changing. That's not the debate. The debate is how do we know what the ideal surface temperature is in 2100?

One thing I learned from meteorology is that being an actual science was no guarantee of exactness.

The only basis for even talking about global warming is the predictions spewed out by computer models. The only quote/unquote "evidence" of global warming is what models are predicting the climate and the weather will be in the next 50 to 100 years. Now, what those models spit out is only as good as the data that's put in, and it's an absolute joke. In terms of science, it's a total joke. There is no warming, global or otherwise!

The United States will continue its efforts to improve our understanding of climate change - to seek hard data, accurate models, and new ways to improve the science - and determine how best to meet these tremendous challenges.

My dad joined Langley in 1964 as a co-op student and retired in 2004 an internationally respected climate scientist.

You think the weather is weird now? Just wait. A new MIT study, just published in a peer-reviewed journal, projects that the Earth could see warming of more than 9 degrees F by 2100 - more than twice earlier projections.

I think we do have cyclic changes in weather, and I think that's been throughout the course of history.