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What will the future climate be like? Scientists around the world are studying climate change, putting together models of the Earth's system and large observational datasets in the hopes of understanding—and predicting over the next 100 years—the planet's climate. But which models are the most plausible and reflect the future of the planet's climate the best?

In an attempt to answer that question and evaluate the plausibility of a given model, EPFL scientists have developed a rating system and classified climate model outputs generated by the global climate community and included in the recent IPCC report.

The EPFL climate scientists find that roughly a third of the models are not doing a good job at reproducing existing sea surface temperature data, a third of them are robust and are not particularly sensitive to carbon emissions, and the other third are also robust but predict a particularly hot future for the planet due to high sensitivity to carbon emissions. The results are published in Nature Communications.

"We show that the carbon sensitive models, the ones that predict much stronger heating than the most probable IPCC estimate, are plausible and should be taken seriously," says Athanasios (Thanos) Nenes, EPFL professor of the Laboratory of Atmospheric Processes and their Impacts, affiliate researcher at the Foundation for Research and Technology Hellas, and author of the study together with graduate student Lucile Ricard.

"In other words, the current measures to reduce carbon emissions, which are based on lower carbon sensitivity estimates, may not be enough to curb a catastrophically hot future," says Ricard.

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