This (and other climate model animations on this site) is on a timeline longer than 100 years. I'm old enough to remember 1988, when climatologists were telling congress than global temperatures will go up 7 degrees by 2000. And they didn't. Some of my older colleagues remember that before global warming, scientists were telling everyone that human pollution was causing an ice age. So yeah, this might work on the younger kids who don't know any better, but most people have grown jaded on the doom and gloom illustrations predicting certain disaster for humanity.

People who don't understand the science that produces these models (aka 99% of us) will either accept it as further proof, or they'll reject it as a machination of individuals with agendas to promote.

It's interesting, but not a particularly good tool for anything IMHO.
=== author's response follows ====
A fair and reasonable comment. The interesting thing about models of any sort is that over time and with validation precision improves. Accuracy is more challenging of course.

Well, think that some significant factors have changed. There's a lots more that's known about climate science now than in the 80s, but especially important is that scientists now have many orders of magnitude more processing power at their disposal than ever before. That sure helps.

Actually, computing power isn't as big of a problem as the human ability to build a good model. The recently-in-the-news James Hansen is one good example. His earliest climate models didn't include oceans. It's not that he couldn't model oceans, he just didn't think to put them in. When his models showed extreme thermal runaway, he knew something was wrong, so he just tweaked a few coefficients (a scientific faux pas which haunted him later). It's not that he was trying to produce a model of the climate which proved his claims right, but that he didn't appreciate the interaction of the oceans with the atmosphere. He also held solar input and atmospheric volume as a constant, even though both vary over time as a semi-steady state function. Such was the infancy of our understand back in those days.

Today, climate models include many more factors, much more precision for the individual data points, and have far more refined equations built into them, and run on computers that are an order of magnitude faster. In spite of this, your five day forecast isn't much more accurate than it was in the 80's. So in spite of all accumulated computing power, the evolution of mathematics to include branches like cellular automata, chaos theory, and the rise of fractal geometry, our best climate models are still only reasonably accurate to about 5 days. After that, all best are off: winters come early, ice bergs melt, pigs fly, dogs and cats living together, and Ashlee Simpson learns to sing on key.

The best illustrative we have is the prevailing trend line which shows temperature increasing over time corellary to atmospheric CO2 increasing over time, and then extrapolate from that what it will be like in a few years. More importantly, we should emphasize that reducing emissions, being carbon neutral, and practicing eco-friendly lifestyles is just the right thing to do. Most people respond better when they feel their doing something of their own volition that makes a big impact.

==== author's response follows ====
All true. However, including ocean interacations and water vapor influences were step function leaps forward. Sensitivity analyses on all the principal variables have been done. You can tell now that the models are much much better because the cliimate skeptic Think Tank experts are attacking "flaws" that were recognized and corrected years ago and are bringing up little in the way of new critiques.

"Some of my older colleagues remember that before global warming, scientists were telling everyone that human pollution was causing an ice age."

Really? And when you say "scientists were telling us", are you talking a majority of climatologists or a large percentage of the scientific literature? If you're referring to 1970's speculation about an ice age, there was hardly wide agreement on long-term climate change, and despite some overblown media coverage it was acknowledged that the science and technology were insufficient to make such a prediction (have a look at the 1975 NAS report).

Here's something to consider:
The Global Cooling Myth.

Oh, and as for the predictions of 7 degree warming by 2000 - how did reviews of such research pan out, and what percentage of such studies ended up supporting this prediction?

"In spite of this, your five day forecast isn't much more accurate than it was in the 80's. So in spite of all accumulated computing power, the evolution of mathematics to include branches like cellular automata, chaos theory, and the rise of fractal geometry, our best climate models are still only reasonably accurate to about 5 days..."

Um, aren't you confusing short-term weather models with macro-climate GCM's? A five day forecast is weather, not climate, and is more error-prone than a 50-year climate projection because weather is more chaotic. Even in weather models they seem to have made some strides over the last 2 decades. But to say current climate models are reasonably accurate to only five days seems rather... inaccurate.

RE: "I'm old enough to remember 1988, when climatologists were telling congress than global temperatures will go up 7 degrees by 2000."

=== "It will happen in 1997" - Greenhouse, by Dakota James.

BWAAAAAHAAAAAHAAA! 'nuf said ...