How future climate/environment changes can be predicted
- Information over time is fed into a weather/climate model
- based on changes in weather patterns, carries out a statistical prediction
- Model is able to alter parameters to observe how future climate can be affected
- needs to review a lot of previous data over a number of years to check if changes are genuine or just cyclical
- Over, for instance 20 years, predictions compared to actual climate conditions to validate/further refine model
- can make use of statistical software packages and spreadsheets.