Get this out of the way first. Making a prediction and then waiting 20-30 years to gather sufficient data to validate the prediction is not the way to do science. Yet this is the expectation in geoscience and earth science, where quick-turn-around of controlled experiments is not possible. The result of this lack of experimental control is that progress in climate science is glacially slow — since most models will fail to some degree, a geophysicist or climate scientist working in a specific domain may only get one chance in their career to test a long lead-time hypothesis. Feedback on results occurs over decades and breakthroughs are rare (see plate tectonics). So what I want to get out of the way first is: don’t expect any predictions from me. And I guarantee someone will ask for one.
However there are ways around having to do a prediction. One option is to consider the application of cross-validation of a model against existing data. As I was trained in the lab world of controlled experiments, this seems quite reasonable. One gets a fast turnaround on evaluating a model so you can try something else, or move on to another problem.
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