Climate models are complex, just like the world they mirror. They simultaneously simulate the interacting, chaotic flow of Earth’s atmosphere and oceans, and they run on the world’s largest supercomputers.

Critiques of climate science, such as the report written for the Department of Energy by a panel in 2025, often point to this complexity to argue that these models are too uncertain to help us understand present-day warming or tell us anything useful about the future.

But the history of climate science tells a different story.

The earliest climate models made specific forecasts about global warming decades before those forecasts could be proved or disproved. And when the observations came in, the models were right. The forecasts weren’t just predictions of global average warming – they also predicted geographical patterns of warming that we see today.

These early predictions starting in the 1960s emanated largely out of a single, somewhat obscure government laboratory outside Princeton, New Jersey: the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory. And many of the discoveries bear the fingerprints of one particularly prescient and persistent climate modeler, Syukuro Manabe, who was awarded the 2021 Nobel Prize in physics for his work.

Manabe’s models, based in the physics of the atmosphere and ocean, forecast the world we now see while also drawing a blueprint for today’s climate models and their ability to simulate our large-scale climate. While models have limitations, it is this track record of success that gives us confidence in interpreting the changes we’re seeing now, as well as predicting changes to come.