CL
Climate: Past, Present & Future

Climate of the Future

Dear “climate sceptic”, do you have a fire insurance? – Climate policy under uncertainty

December 12, 2019
Dear “climate sceptic”, do you have a fire insurance? – Climate policy under uncertainty
Smoke clears after an experimental wildfire in Australian eucalyptus forest. Credit: Stefan Doerr (distributed via imaggeo.egu.eu)

One often hears that ambitious climate policy might be premature while climate change is still “uncertain”. This sounds like a fair argument: The amount of global warming per doubling CO2 is not well constrained, and the amount of economic damage per degree of warming even less. But is this uncertainty a sound excuse to wait and see?   Uncertainty, risk aversion, and insurance If you knew the ...[Read More]

Habits in numerical model construction

October 2, 2019
Habits in numerical model construction
Interviews were conducted with modellers about the construction of their model.

  Numerical models are omnipresent in climate research. Constructed to understand the past, to forecast future climate and to gain new knowledge on natural processes and interactions, they enable the simulation of experiments at otherwise unreachable time and spatial scales. These instruments have long been considered to be fed – let even determined – by either theories or observations alone. ...[Read More]

What can artificial intelligence do for climate science?

September 26, 2018
What can artificial intelligence do for climate science?

What is machine learning? Artificial Intelligence, and its subfield of machine learning, is a very trending topic as it plays an increasing role in our daily life. Examples are: translation programs, speech recognition software in mobile phones and automatic completion of search queries. However, what value do these new techniques have for climate science? And how complicated is it to use them? Th ...[Read More]

Of butterflies and climate: how mathematics helps us to better understand the atmosphere

August 1, 2017

Applied mathematics is often seen as an obscure field, which the general public has no hope of ever understanding. In the context of climate science, this is far from the truth. In fact, many mathematical concepts and ideas applied to the study of the climate system stem from intuitive arguments. While their implementation can be very complex, understanding the basic ideas behind them does not req ...[Read More]