Climate of the Present

A glimpse into the INTIMATE’s summer school of 2022

Ricardo N. Santos November 21, 2022

Group photo of the INTIMATE summer school 2022 at Kokkila. Photo Credit: Francesco Muschitiello.

The Earth’s climate has been rapidly changing in the last decades. That’s a fact! Virtually, every one of us has been experiencing those changes in person, but how do we know that Earth’s climate has changed in the past beyond the instrumental data of the last ~200 years? From ancient manuscripts to geologic records, there are many “archives” one might consider “reading” to infer or reconstruct pa ...[Read More]

Communicating climate change

Salvador Herrando-Pérez and David Vieites November 15, 2022

Both the uncertainty inherent in scientific data, and the background and ethics of the communicators who report such data to any given audience, can sow doubt about the science of climate change. The perception of this duality is engrained in how the human mind works, whereby we tolerate lies but are always ready to condemn hypocrisy. We illustrate this through a personal experience that is connec ...[Read More]

Simple is good: How we understand climate using idealised models

Anupama K Xavier, Oisin Hamilton and Stéphane Vannitsem September 18, 2022

The first satellite image was from the ESA-MSG-4 geostationary weather satellite (link). Second image is from Earth.nullschool, showing a forecast for the earth's wind at 250hPa (link). The last image shows fictional results of a simplified qg like model, image is photoshopped from the gqs model outputs. The figure was designed by Oisin Hamilton.

Do you gravitate to science because of the subject’s ability to explain complicated behaviour in nature through experimentation? When we see things or get our hands dirty by conducting experiments, it helps us comprehend scientific theories which are harder to explain. Introducing a complicated scientific theory is often carried out initially by presenting a simplified version. For example, stude ...[Read More]

A modern take on the 19th-century scientific expeditions: cruise MSM104/1

Eduardo Queiroz Alves July 7, 2022

Figure 1. Sunset onboard RV Maria S Merian (Photo: Eduardo Queiroz Alves).

“Every ship that navigates the high seas, with these charts and blank abstract logs on board, may henceforth be regarded as a floating observatory, a temple of science.” – Matthew Fontaine Maury This is a joint post, published together with the climate sciences division blog and the ocean sciences division blog. The ocean has always been important for humanity, with trade and war being just ...[Read More]