Related papers: How far can we trust climate change predictions?
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,…
In the past decades human activities caused global Earth system changes, e.g., climate change or biodiversity loss. Simultaneously, these associated impacts have increased environmental awareness within societies across the globe, thereby…
The theory of alternative stable states and tipping points has garnered substantial attention in the last several decades. It predicts potential critical transitions from one ecosystem state to a completely different state under increasing…
Studying extreme events and how they evolve in a changing climate is one of the most important current scientific challenges. Starting from complex climate models, a key difficulty is to be able to run long enough simulations in order to…
In climate science, the tuning of climate models is a computationally intensive problem due to the combination of the high-dimensionality of the system state and long integration times. Supermodelling is a technique which has shown the…
Palaeoclimate archives contain information on climate variability, trends and mechanisms. Models are developed to explain observations and predict the response of the climate system to perturbations, in particular perturbations associated…
Earth System Models (ESMs) are the state of the art for projecting the effects of climate change. However, longstanding uncertainties in their ability to simulate regional and local precipitation extremes and related processes inhibit…
In recent years, the climate change research community has become highly interested in describing the anthropogenic influence on extreme weather events, commonly termed "event attribution." Limitations in the observational record and in…
Catastrophic transitions, where a system shifts abruptly between alternate steady states, are a generic feature of many nonlinear systems. Recently these regime shift were suggested as the mechanism underlies many ecological catastrophes,…
Seasonal climate forecasts are being used increasingly across a range of application sectors. A recent UK governmental report asked: How good are seasonal climate forecasts on a scale of 1-5 (where 5 is very good), and how good can we…
Rapid changes in Earth's cryosphere caused by human activity can lead to significant environmental impacts. Computer models provide a useful tool for understanding the behavior and projecting the future of Arctic and Antarctic ice sheets.…
Climate change is the long-term shift in global weather patterns, largely caused by anthropogenic activity of greenhouse gas emissions. Global climate temperatures have unmistakably risen and naturally occurring climate variability alone…
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…
Climate change is a non-uniform phenomenon. This paper proposes a new quantitative methodology to characterize, measure, and test the existence of climate change heterogeneity. It consists of three steps. First, we introduce a new testable…
Over the last few decades, climate scientists have devoted much effort to the development of large numerical models of the atmosphere and the ocean. While there is no question that such models provide important and useful information on…
Both global, intermediate and local scales of Climate Change have been studied extensively, but a unified diagnostic framework for examining all spatial scales concurrently has remained elusive. Here we present a new tool-set using…
Over its multibillion-year history, the Earth has experienced a wide range of climates. The long-term climate is controlled by the atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration, which is regulated by marine sequestration through chemical…
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…
Anticipating a tipping point, a transition from one stable steady state to another, is a problem of broad relevance due to the ubiquity of the phenomenon in diverse fields. The steady-state nature of the dynamics about a tipping point makes…
The CMIP global climate models (GCMs) assess that nearly 100% of global surface warming observed between 1850-1900 and 2011-2020 is attributable to anthropogenic drivers like greenhouse gas emissions. These models also generate future…