OSLO (Reuters) - Scientists are trying to improve predictions about the impact of global warming this century by pooling estimates about the risk of floods or desertification.
"We feel certain about some of the aspects of future climate change, like that it is going to get warmer," said Matthew Collins of the British Met Office. "But on many of the details it's very difficult to say."
"The way we can deal with this is a new technique of expressing the predictions in terms of probabilities," Collins told Reuters of climate research published in the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A.
But these have flaws because of a lack of understanding about how clouds form, for instance, or how Antarctica's ice will react to less cold. And reliable temperature records in most nations stretch back only about 150 years.
"Climate science is a very new science and we have only just begun to explore the uncertainties," said David Stainforth of Oxford University in England who contributed research to the Royal Society.
"We should expect the uncertainty to increase rather than decrease" in coming years as scientists work to understand the climate, he said. That would complicate the chances of assigning probabilities.