Related papers: How to cope with climate's complexity
Global climate models aim to reproduce physical processes on a global scale and predict quantities such as temperature given some forcing inputs. We consider climate ensembles made of collections of such runs with different initial…
A "toy" model, simple and elementary enough for an undergraduate class, of the temperature dependence of the greenhouse (mid-IR) absorption by atmospheric water vapor implies a bistable climate system. The stable states are glaciation and…
With a changing climate, the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events are likely to increase, posing a threat to infrastructure systems' resilience. The response of infrastructure systems to localised failures depends on whether…
A challenge in global change biology is to predict how species will respond to future environmental change and to manage these responses. To make such predictions and management actions robust to novel futures, we need to accurately…
In a complex community, species continuously adapt to each other. On rare occasions, the adaptation of a species can lead to the extinction of others, and even its own. "Adaptive dynamics" is the standard mathematical framework to describe…
Quantifying long-term historical climate is fundamental to understanding recent climate change. Most instrumentally recorded climate data are only available for the past 200 years, so proxy observations from natural archives are often…
Multi-model ensembles provide a pragmatic approach to the representation of model uncertainty in climate prediction. However, such representations are inherently ad hoc, and, as shown, probability distributions of climate variables based on…
Understanding the earth's climate system and how it might be changing is a preeminent scientific challenge. Global climate models are used to simulate past, present, and future climates, and experiments are executed continuously on an array…
Ice storms are extreme weather events that can have devastating implications for the sustainability of natural ecosystems as well as man made infrastructure. Ice storms are caused by a complex mix of atmospheric conditions and are among the…
The sensitivity of climate models to increasing CO2 concentration and the climate response at decadal time scales are still major factors of uncertainty for the assessment of the long and short term effects of anthropogenic climate change.…
Cenozoic temperature, sea level and CO2 co-variations provide insights into climate sensitivity to external forcings and sea level sensitivity to climate change. Climate sensitivity depends on the initial climate state, but potentially can…
Energy system models underpin decisions by energy system planners and operators. Energy system modelling faces a transformation: accounting for changing meteorological conditions imposed by climate change. To enable that transformation, a…
The problem of the insensitivity of the macroscopic behavior of any thermodynamical system to partitioning generates a bias between the reproducibility of its macroscopic behavior viewed as the simplest form of causality and its long-term…
This topic review communicates working experiences regarding interaction of a multiplicity of processes. Our experiences come from climate change modelling, materials science, cell physiology and public health, and macroeconomic modelling.…
Large ensembles of climate projections are essential for characterizing uncertainty in future climate and extreme weather events, yet computational constraints of numerical climate models limit ensemble sizes to a small number of…
The temperature in the transient climate response is lower than the equilibrium temperature for the same amount of forcing. The degree of disequilibrium is not constant in time and depends on various climate parameters. We derive intuition…
Complex systems are often characterized by the interplay of multiple interconnected dynamical processes operating across a range of temporal scales. This phenomenon is widespread in both biological and artificial scenarios, making it…
Natural climate variability, captured through multiple initial condition ensembles, may be comparable to the variability caused by knowledge gaps in future emissions trajectories and in the physical science basis, especially at…
Climate models exhibit an approximately invariant surface warming pattern in typical end-of-century projections. This observation has been used extensively in climate impact assessments for fast calculations of local temperature anomalies,…
Climate change impacts a broad spectrum of human resources and activities, necessitating the use of climate models to project long-term effects and inform mitigation and adaptation strategies. These models generate multiple datasets by…