Climate change has been described as “the biggest market failure in human history”[1]. Although fuel is costly, emitting the by-product CO2 is for free; yet it causes damages to society. In other words, those who benefit, by using the atmosphere as waste dump, do not pay the full costs, i.e. the adverse effects climate change has on societies on a global scale. Can this market failure be cured? Sh ...[Read More]
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]
What is in the (European) air?
Figure 1: ICOS station network (ICOS ERIC, https://www.icos-ri.eu)
You thought that Mauna Loa was the only observatory to provide continuous measurements of atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration and were disappointed because Hawaii is way too far from your study area or because you wanted to know how bad the air is in your hometown? The US have been monitoring the composition of the atmosphere since 1972, but what about Europe? Since 2008, Europe has its own ...[Read More]
Of butterflies and climate: how mathematics helps us to better understand the atmosphere
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]