Related papers: Uncertainty in Climate Science: Not Cause for Inac…
Stochastic thermodynamics is a framework for describing non-equilibrium processes at the level of fluctuating trajectories, where the state of a system evolves as a stochastic time series, allowing thermodynamic quantities such as work,…
Important issues about climate change are summarized and discussed: A large body of evidence shows that the world climate is getting warmer. Climate models give a consistent explanation of this observation once human-made emissions of…
We analyze global surface temperature data obtained at 13472 weather stations from the year 1702 to 1990. The mean annual temperature of a station fluctuates from year to year by typically +-0.6oC (one standard deviation). Superimposed on…
The past twenty years have seen a resurgence of interest in nonequilibrium thermodynamics, thanks to advances in the theory of stochastic processes and in their thermodynamic interpretation. Fluctuation theorems provide fundamental…
Meteorological data have been used to calculate refractive index fluctuations - the indicator of optical instability of the Earth's atmosphere. The calculations were made for standard pressure levels of the atmosphere in winter and summer.…
We present a mathematical analysis of records drawn from independent random variables with a drifting mean. To leading order the change in the record rate is proportional to the ratio of the drift velocity to the standard deviation of the…
The annual temperature cycle of the earth closely follows the annual cycle of solar flux. At temperate latitudes, both driving and response cycles are well described by a strong annual sinusoidal component and a non-vanishing semiannual…
Turbulence, namely, irregular fluctuations in space and time characterize fluid flows in general and atmospheric flows in particular.The irregular,i.e., nonlinear space-time fluctuations on all scales contribute to the unpredictable nature…
The existence of fluctuations of temperature has been a somewhat controversial topic in thermodynamics but nowadays it is recognized that they must be taken into account in small, finite systems. Although for nonequilibrium steady states…
Climate predictions are only meaningful if the associated uncertainty is reliably estimated. A standard practice for providing climate projections is to use an ensemble of projections. The ensemble mean serves as the projection while the…
Over its multibillion-year history, Earth has exhibited a wide range of climates. Its history ranges from snowball episodes where the surface was mostly or entirely covered by ice to periods much warmer than today, where the cryosphere was…
Global Climate Models (GCMs) provide forecasts of future climate warming using a wide variety of highly sophisticated anthropogenic CO2 emissions models as input, each based on the evolution of four emissions "drivers": population p,…
The mean world climate has warmed since the 19th Century as the anthropogenic emission of greenhouse gases has increased the atmospheric opacity to thermal infrared radiation. Has this warming increased the frequency or severity of…
Global warming arises from 'temperature forcing', a net imbalance between energy fluxes entering and leaving the climate system and arising within it. Humanity introduces temperature forcing through greenhouse gas emissions, agriculture,…
Long-range climate forecasts use integrated assessment models to link the global economy to greenhouse gas emissions. This paper evaluates an alternative economic framework outlined in part 1 of this study (Garrett, 2014) that approaches…
Multistability is a ubiquitous feature in systems of geophysical relevance and provides key challenges for our ability to predict a system's response to perturbations. Near critical transitions small causes can lead to large effects and -…
Wildfire is an important system process of the earth that occurs across a wide range of spatial and temporal scales. A variety of methods have been used to predict wildfire phenomena during the past century to better our understanding of…
Climate models have become an important tool in the study of climate and climate change, and ensemble experiments consisting of multiple climate-model runs are used in studying and quantifying the uncertainty in climate-model output.…
In traditional extreme value analysis, the bulk of the data is ignored, and only the tails of the distribution are used for inference. Extreme observations are specified as values that exceed a threshold or as maximum values over distinct…
Global climate change, extreme climate events, earthquakes and their accompanying natural disasters pose significant risks to humanity. Yet due to the nonlinear feedbacks, strategic interactions and complex structure of the Earth system,…