Weather: The Cloudy Chaos of Computerised Climates

Beginning of article

When world experts in various aspects of weather forecasting get together, it only serves to emphasise the complexity of the problem they are tackling.

The physics of climate sounds a daunting subject. As a conference held by the Royal Meteorological Society and the Institute of Physics at the Royal Society last week showed, "daunting" is an understatement.

The key to understanding climatic change is to produce computer models that accurately simulate the global climate. The challenge is to establish which physical processes matter and how they interact. In the opening address, Sir John Houghton, co-chairman of Working Group 1 of the Intergovernmental Panel on …