we should be able to do a wonderful job of modeling. In fact, it's not at all like that. It is an enormous challenge to model the climate on the scales that are useful for understanding how it responds to human influences. The way in which it's done is to cut the earth, both the atmosphere and the oceans, into small bits, voxels, volume elements like pixels, but three dimensions. And there are hundreds of millions of these that you need to cover the earth. You then use the basic laws of physics to move the energy, the atmosphere, the momentum, the matter through these voxels, time step by time step, as small as 10 minutes sometimes, and watch the climate evolve under solar heating, greenhouse gases, infrared radiation, and so on. And we build these physical processes in. There are, however, a number of practical problems that make it very difficult to do this in a useful way. Because computer power is not infinite, we have a significant computer power these days, but nowhere near (30/57)
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