What are the main uncertainties in predicting future climates?

Question

What are the main uncertainties in predicting future climates?

Answer 1

Butterflies ... Chaos Theory ..

Tiny errors in measuring the current state and tiny differences in the factors thought or assumed to contribute to climate change (and factors that contribute but are not known) lead to massive differences in predicted outcome ..

Essentially, none of the current models are able to 'predict' next months weather, let alone next years or the next decades with any real degree of accuracy .. models used to make 'broad brush' predictions over thousand year timescales are no good at predicting what's going to happen in 10 or 20 years time ..

You might thing that the short term differences between predication and actual are insignificant .. however lookup 'El Nino' .. (half the models are predicting continuation, half not ..)