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Climate Change and Uncertainty - Coggle Diagram
Climate Change and Uncertainty
Weather: short term fluctuations of the atmosphere.
Due to internal atmospheric instabilities, weather events are not predictable deterministically beyond about 1-2 weeks
Climate: the prevailing weather, includes both the mean and the range of variations
Climate Variability: variations in the mean state and other statistics (such as s.dev and occurrence of extreme events) of the climate on all temporal and spatial scales beyond that of individual weather events e.g. El Niño and orbital cycles
Climate Change: a statistically significant variation in either the mean state of the climate or in its variability, persisting for an extended period.
How can we forecast the climate a season to a century ahead
Natural Factors driving climate change
Solar variability (sunspot cycle)
Orbital cycles (e.g. ice ages)
Volcanic eruptions
Temperature of the Oceans
Movement of ocean currents (e.g. Golf Stream)
Other ocean-atmospheric processes such as ENSO
Anthropogenic Factors driving climate change
Atmospheric composition (GHG and aerosols)
Land use change (affects reflectivity)
Uncertainty due to emissions
Representative Concentration Pathways (RCPs)
RCP2.6: mitigation scenario leading to a very low forcing level
RCP4.5: stabilisation scenario
RCP6: stabilisation scenario
RCP8.5: business as usual with very high greenhouse gas
NEW: Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs)
SSP1 is the most sustainable and SSP5 is based on fossil-fuelled development
Model Uncertainty
Use most sophisticated models to make predictions - called couple models = CMIP, there are 38 models in total
Have a limited number of models to predict into the future, and models shows different projections
Natural/internal variability
These are from natural oscillations of the climate such as ENSO
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC): role is to access the sceintific, technical and socio-economic information relevant for the understanding of the risk of human-indued climate change. They use likelihood terminology.
Climate Change Awareness
Most spend time thinking about the weather but not the climate.
Atttitudes include:
Denial: human activity has little influence
Blame: governments/coorporations resposible, developed world
Minimisation: not an immediate concern to individuals
2 types of thinking:
Associative/affective reasoning = fast, intuitive, emotional, personal
Analytic/intellectual reasoning = slower, logical, deliberative, logical, statistical