However, overfishing is a real risk and can cause fishing grounds to collapse. Fishing and selling fish to export markets is an important industry for many countries including New Zealand (worth $1.4 billion dollars in 2009). The results are used to inform politicians about what could happen to the climate and what can be changed.Īnother common use of models is in management of fisheries. To learn more about work to collate data for models, look at the Argo Project and the work being done to collect large-scale temperature and salinity data to understand what role the ocean plays in climate and climate change.įor example, they can use data to predict what the climate might be like in 20 years if we keep producing carbon dioxide at current rates – what might happen if we produce more carbon dioxide and what would happen if we produce less. Models further rely on the work of scientists to collect quality data to feed into the models. Using this information and an understanding of how these cycles interact, scientists are trying to figure out what might happen.
Humans don’t know the full effect they are having on the planet, but we do know a lot about carbon cycles, water cycles and weather. The best examples are climate models and climate change. In some situations, models are developed by scientists to try and predict things. These days, many models are likely to be mathematical and are run on computers, rather than being a visual representation, but the principle is the same. Scientists start with a small amount of data and build up a better and better representation of the phenomena they are explaining or using for prediction as time goes on. The globe was constructed in Greece so perhaps only showed a small amount of land in Europe, and it wouldn’t have had Australia, China or New Zealand on it! As the amount of knowledge has built up over hundreds of years, the model has improved until, by the time a globe made from real images was produced, there was no noticeable difference between the representation and the real thing.
(In 2005, the first globe using satellite pictures from NASA was produced.) The first known globe to be made (in 150BC) was not very accurate. Until 2005, globes were always an artist’s representation of what we thought the planet looked like. Think about a model showing the Earth – a globe.