New York City is home to some of the world's most attractive models; it is also home to some of the least attractive ones, presented yearly to the United Nations' International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The current state of global warming modeling has been rather poor, detracting both from research indicating anthropogenic influence and that which contraindicates it. The result is that the debate about climate control, an issue which effects major economic policy decisions, is monopolized by this distraction.

Microsoft Research ecologist Drew Purves acknowledges that this problem is one of the largest ones confronting global warming researchers. He and researchers at Princeton University and universities in Madrid, Spain are calling on the international research community to not throw out modeling or focus on the poor current models, but rather to develop new, better models. In particular, they point out a rather common sense start point -- as forests and other plant populations form the crux of the carbon balance, a better understanding of their effects and how to model them needs to be developed and needs to help form the foundation of future models.