Modeling paleoclimates

Paleoclimatic data and climate models play a complimentary role in understanding climate change. This chapter provides an overview of the process of climate-system modeling, presents the taxonomy of the models recently applied in the study of Quaternary climate change and variation, and discusses the development of climate modeling since the 1965 International Union for Quaternary Science (INQUA) volume and its companions are published. Models based on physical principles do have the potential to provide mechanistic explanations of past climatic variations, provided they are known to work, are applied in an appropriately designed experiment, and explicitly account for all of the components of the climate system that are involved in a particular climate change. Climate models can be classified according to the applications to which they are put, which include simulating the temporal evolution and spatial patterns of the climate system and the attendant responses of environmental subsystems. The objective of paleoclimate modeling is to quantify the behavior and variations of the components that describe the climate system.