چکیده:
Faced with the realities of a changing climate, decision makers in a wide variety of organizations are increasingly seeking quantitative climate predictions. Specifically, they require predictions of the regional and local changes in climate that will impact people, economies, and ecosystems. Such predictions are available (e.g., Solomon et al. 2007) but are subject to considerable uncertainty. Thus, an important issue for these decision makers, and for organizations that fund climate research, is as follows: what is the scope for narrowing the uncertainty through future investments in climate science? Here, we address this question through analysis of twenty-first-century surface air temperature predictions (shown in Fig. 1) in the World Climate Research Programme’s (WCRP’s) Coupled Model Intercomparison Project phase 3 (CMIP3) multimodel dataset, as used in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report (AR4; Solomon et al. 2007). This analysis is subject to some caveats, which we acknowledge and discuss.