The biggest unknown in climate modelling is how long carbon emissions will continue, and at what pace.
Professor Allen stressed that with so much still unknown about climate change, the findings in his research and, by extension, the IPPC report, deal in probabilities rather than certainties.
Leaving aside the huge unknown of climate change, whether or not the sixth great extinction is looming depends largely on what happens to growth and how humanity manages that growth.Faster growth will mean higher consumption of resources and more pressure on habitat, which is bad for other species.
However, it is still rather unknown how climate change modifies the growth partitioning between the trees in forest stands.
That uncertainty in turn leads to the biggest unknown for climate scientists when they calculate the rate at which the seas are rising.
The reason for the increased incidence of WNV disease in 2012 is unknown, although climate, ecological changes in WNV vectors, and viral genetics have been suggested.
We therefore know that we are increasing the chance of encountering unknown unknowns, and this knowledge arising out of deep uncertainty entails an impetus for climate mitigation.
It is unknown how global climate change will affect species distributions and developmental events in subtropical ecosystems or if climate change will differentially favor nonnative species.
Follow-up studies that focus on succession and recent dynamics are however necessary, especially with the increasing fire occurrences (Pricope and Binford 2012), ongoing deforestation, conversion to commercial cattle farms and the unknown effect of climate change.
Whether these daily phenomena represent a so far unknown feature of climate change effects on weather systems remain unclear, future research is required to be able to make this determination.
