Predicting Our Climate Future: What We Know, What We Don’t Know, And What We Can’t Know is a book we should all read, especially policymakers, and climate scientist David Stainforth is just the person to write it. Climate modelling stands at the heart of our modern world’s most dire existential crisis, yet few of us know much about the modelling. In particular, as Stainforth points out time and time again, those models are a bewildering mix of hard science, near-wild speculation, and all the gradations in between. Moreover, climate modelling is a youngster in the pantheon of science, yet very little effort is expended in understanding and explaining exactly what they predict and how sound those predictions are. As Stainforth acknowledges, our newly obtained massive increase in computation blinds us to the problems inherent in attempting to model an entire planet. In essence, Predicting Our Climate Future is the author’s impassioned plea to take modelling to a new, clearer, better understood level. Stainforth is a brilliant expositor, able to offer wonderful analogies to explain the intricacies of the models. I was besotted from beginning to end, but also angry beyond belief that my Australian government does not devote unlimited public service funds and resources to gaining a bipartisan, deep comprehension of the impact of national policy (instead both our parties rely on rubbish modelling brochures with no debate). I can heartily recommend Predicting Our Climate Future but beware: this is as clear a telling as possible but the very nature of climate models means the read is a brain strainer.
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