Thursday, 20 January 2011
By Graeme Pearman

Projecting the future, even only a decade ahead, can be achieved by extrapolating current trends and/or using insight concerning the fundamental processes of the involved systems. Either way, uncertainties will exist.

This is certainly true with climate change and the likely emerging impacts of that change. Nevertheless, foresight has enormous potential benefits for seizing opportunities and avoiding pitfalls. In the end, it is about the management of risk, albeit recognising that in some cases anticipation of outcomes will turn out to be useful, if not essential, while in others, in the light of experience, it may be seen as having been a waste of effort.

Both the changes that have occurred to the global and regional climate over recent decades and our theoretical understanding of the climate system make it likely that for the next decade the trend towards warmer global average temperatures will continue. There will be year-to-year variations in average temperatures and even more so in climatic parameters at the regional level. The natural climate system is variable and that variability will continue.
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