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Scientists don't know enough about the details of abrupt climate change to accurately predict it. With better information, society could take more confident action to reduce the potential impact of abrupt changes on agriculture, water resources, and the built environment, among other impacts. A better understanding through research of such things as sea-ice and glacier stability, land-surface processes, and atmospheric and oceanic circulation patterns is needed. Moreover, to effectively use any additional knowledge of these and other physical processes behind abrupt climate change, more sophisticated ways of assessing their interactions must be developed, including:

• Better models. At present, the models used to assess climate and its impacts cannot simulate the size, speed, and extent of past abrupt changes, let alone predict future abrupt changes. Efforts are needed to improve how the mechanisms driving abrupt climate change are represented in these models and to more rigorously test models against the climate record.
• More paleoclimatic data. More climate information from the distant past would go a long way toward strengthening our understanding of abrupt climate changes and our models of past climate. In particular, an enhanced effort is needed to expand the geographic coverage, temporal resolution, and variety of paleoclimatic data.
• Appropriate statistical tools. Because most statistical calculations at present are based on the assumption that climates are not changing but are stationary, they have limited value for nonstationary (changing) climates and for climate-related variables that are often highly skewed by rapid changes over time - such as for abrupt-change regimes. Available statistical tools themselves need to be adapted or replaced with new approaches altogether to better reflect the properties of abrupt climate change.