What if this and that… The art of prediction is one that often fails and only the test of time will show who is right and who is wrong. Climate models use quantitative methods to simulate the interactions of the atmosphere, oceans, land surface, and ice. There is a new paper in Nature Geoscience that examines the inertia of carbon dioxide emissions. New research indicates the impact of rising CO2 levels in the Earth’s atmosphere will cause effects to the climate for at least the next 1,000 years, causing these researchers to estimate a collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet by the year 3000, and an eventual rise in the global sea level of at least four meters. The study is the first full climate model simulation to make predictions out to 1000 years from now. It is based on a best-case, zero-emissions scenarios constructed by a team of researchers from the Canadian Center for Climate Modeling and Analysis and the University of Calgary.