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Abstract
What can we say about changes in the hydrologic cycle on 50-year timescales when we
cannot predict rainfall next week? Eventually, perhaps, a great deal: the overall
climate response to increasing atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases may
prove much simpler and more predictable than the chaos of short-term weather. Quantifying
the diversity of possible responses is essential for any objective, probability-based
climate forecast, and this task will require a new generation of climate modelling
experiments, systematically exploring the range of model behaviour that is consistent
with observations. It will be substantially harder to quantify the range of possible
changes in the hydrologic cycle than in global-mean temperature, both because the
observations are less complete and because the physical constraints are weaker.