Areas where debate is not over: National Academy of Sciences admits climate sensitivity, sea-ice loss, precipitation extremes need more work

From the new National Academy of Sciences report on climate modeling:

As a general guideline for most effectively meeting future climate information needs, climate modeling activities should focus on problems whose solution will help climate models better inform societal needs, and for which progress is likely given adequate resources. With
such focus, advances in Earth system modeling may yield significant progress in the next decade or two for a number of scientific questions, including sea-ice loss, icesheet stability, land-ocean ecosystem and carbon-cycle change, regional precipitation changes and extremes, cloud-climate interaction, and climate sensitivity.

As these challenges are faced and models grow in complexity, they are likely to exhibit an increasingly rich range of behavior, full of surprises and unexpected results. Therefore, the committee emphasizes that it is unwise to promise that successive generations of models will invariably result in firmer predictive capability…

Read the report.