5 What will more global warming mean later this century?

5.1 How do we know what future climate will look like?

We don't ‘know’ what future climate will look like. The system is too big, open, complex and chaotic for that. But we can use models and scenarios to help us to improve our understanding of how the system works, and to test how it might respond to future changes.

We can test the models by their ability to reproduce historical climate change, and the impact of particular events such as volcanic eruptions.

These issues and related factors are explored in this section.