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Climate simulations: recognize the ‘hot model’ problem

The sixth and latest IPCC assessment weights climate models according to how well they reproduce other evidence. Now the rest of the community should do the same.
  1. Zeke Hausfather

    1. Zeke Hausfather is climate research lead at Stripe, South San Francisco, California, USA.

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  2. Kate Marvel

    1. Kate Marvel is a research scientist at the Center for Climate Systems Research, Columbia University; and at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, New York, USA.

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  3. Gavin A. Schmidt

    1. Gavin A. Schmidt is director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, New York, USA.

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  4. John W. Nielsen-Gammon

    1. John W. Nielsen-Gammon is a professor and Texas State Climatologist in the Department of Atmospheric Sciences, Texas A&M University, College Station, Texas, USA.

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  5. Mark Zelinka

    1. Mark Zelinka is a staff scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Livermore, California, USA.

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During high tide the coastal region of Namkhana Island in West Bengal, India is being damaged rapidly, as a hime is flooded.

Island communities in the Ganges–Brahmaputra delta in south Asia are at risk of flooding as a result of climate warming. Credit: Supratim Bhattacharjee/ZUMA Wire

Computer models that project future climates are widely used for adaptation, mitigation and resilience planning. More than 50 such models were assessed and compared in the latest round of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project, phase 6 (CMIP6), run by the World Climate Research Programme1. It is crucial that researchers know the best way to use those outputs to provide consistent information for climate science and policy.

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Nature 605, 26-29 (2022)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-022-01192-2

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Supplementary Information

  1. Supplementary data description
  2. Supplementary data

Competing Interests

The authors declare no competing interests.

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