Event


Climate Change: Facts, Frenzy and Forecasts

Nathan Paldor, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, The Institute of Earth Sciences, Visiting Professor, Earth & Environmental Science Department, Univ of Pennsylvania

Apr 29, 2015 at | 358 Hayden Hall

The Climate on Earth results from many Physical and Chemical processes that span many scales - from micron to global in space and from minutes to decades in time. Many of the processes that control our climate cannot be accurately represented in Climate models where the time and space resolution is bounded. Given the complexity of the processes that determine Earth's Climate and the bounded accuracy of Climate models the shortcoming of the models in their attempt to forecast past observed climate changes should not come as a surprise. Since the Ocean is the main determinant of the Climate on Earth rather than the Atmosphere and since observations in the Ocean are far more scarce than in the Atmosphere even the task of quantifying past climate changes is far from simple. In this presentation, Professor Paldor will attempt to delineate some of the well known and understood facts and distinguish between them, and the unclear and uncertain ones. In particular, he will discuss some of the limitations that climate modelers have to overcome before forecasts of future climate changes can be trusted.