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CLIMATE MODELING
Predicting the Results of a Global Experiment
Ever since the beginning of the industrial era, when humans began dramatically increasing the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by burning large quantities of fossil fuels, we have unintentionally been conducting a massive experiment on the Earth’s climate. Unfortunately, this uncontrolled experiment does not meet the criteria of the scientific method—we do not have a parallel “control” planet Earth where we can observe how the climate would have evolved without the addition of CO2 and other greenhouse gases. One of the goals of computational climate modeling is to provide such control scenarios so that human contributions to climate change can be quantified. This section describes how climate researchers studied the rising boundary between the troposphere and stratosphere and determined that human activity is the principal cause.