There's an interesting draft paper (pdf) by Hansen, Sato, and a few others. Lots of stuff in it - these people are no fans of the "least publishable unit" method of producing papers, that's for sure. There's a video of Hansen discussing the paper at Climate Progress.

The the thing that caught my eye was this part of the abstract:

We conclude that most climate models mix heat too efficiently into the deep ocean and as a result underestimate the negative forcing by human-made aerosols.

Briefly, results from the Argo system of buoys over the last six years show that there is not as much heat going to the deep ocean as previously thought. Since models are giving the right numbers anyway, there must be less net warming than was thought. Net warming is made up of gross warming from greenhouse gases, less the effects of, mainly, aerosols - sulphur compounds and other things in the air. Since the greenhouse gas part of the warming is known quite precisely, the lower-than-thought net warming must be because aerosols have a bigger cooling effect, or there are a lot more of them, than was thought. (As an illustration of indirect aerosol effects, have a look at the effect of ships using high-sulphur fuel oil. Bright white clouds.)

What's the point? Well, when air pollution decreases, then the warming will be about twice as fast as we thought it would be. And China is now installing sulphur scrubbers on its coal-fired power stations...

Anyway, I was wondering how easy it would be to adjust the "ocean mixing" and "aerosol effects" parts of models. Hansen seems to think that it's not so easy.

Strictly from the point of view of this project:

The experiments here are 'thought up' by climatologists from various places, and from under-grads of the climate course at the U of Oxford.
The work is based on existing models that have been created by the UK Met Office, and in the case of the Millennium project, the U of Reading plus others.

To research the 'new' ideas, (or others), someone will need to come up with a research proposal, along with funding.

The aerosol part may simply be a matter of adjusting one or more of the parameters used to start one of the available model types.
Ocean mixing is a different matter. I'm not sure if the 'coupled models', such as the hadcm3, would be suitable or not.
And then there's the problem of should the 2 effects be run together, or in separate research projects.

And it's quite likely that the Met Office is 'onto this'. It's bound to be getting talked about in various places, anyway. When anything will be made public is another matter.

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