What are the three major sources of uncertainty when making predictions about the future climate?

Question

What are the three major sources of uncertainty when making predictions about the future climate?

Answer 1

1) Natural Climate variability, how changes in ocean circulation and atmospheric circulation can alter short term climate. Such as La-Nina,PDO and AO.

2) Earths Albedo, small changes in cloud cover can cause huge changes in the amount of sunlight earth receives. This simple fact is completely beyond the capabilities of the most sophisticated climate models.

3) Convection, Evaporation and condensation, the hydrological cycle of the atmosphere causes huge amounts of energy to be transferred from the surface to the upper atmosphere, which has nothing to do with the greenhouse process. This physical process is also missing from climate models.

These are three big items that are not sufficiently understood well enough to make climate projections decades into the future.

Answer 2

If you're talking about with regard to human activity:

1) Exactly how much warming a certain increase in CO2 levels will cause.

2) Whether the climate has net positive or negative feedback and how strong that feedback is.

3) How much CO2 levels will increase.

Answer 3

We don't know what is going to happen.

We can't really be sure we know what has happened.

We are arrogant.

Answer 4

We look at climate records for the past 30 years and the earth has been warming

Next we look the past satellite pictures of the arctic ice and compare it with the present and have seen its been melting

Next we look at the increase of severe weather, hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, heat waves.