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Provides thorough and comprehensive coverage of new and important quantitative methods in data science, for graduate students and practitioners.
The processes and consequences of climate change are extremely heterogeneous, encompassing many different fields of study. Dr David Rind in his career at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and as a professor at Columbia University has had the opportunity to explore many of these subjects with colleagues from these diverse disciplines. It was therefore natural for the Lectures in Climate Change series to begin with his colleagues contributing lectures on their specific areas of expertise.This first volume, entitled Our Warming Planet: Topics in Climate Dynamics, encompasses topics such as natural and anthropogenic climate forcing, climate modeling, radiation, clouds, atmospheric dyn...
This edited volume provides a variety of insights into the context in which ocean and wetlands policy is placed at the sub-continental level. The governments of Mexico, Canada, and United States of America have recognized the importance of conserving, protecting, and enhancing the environment in their territories. As a result, they have developed an institutional structure aimed at furthering environmental cooperation. However, marine environment has played a secondary role, characterized by scientific cooperation that does not develop into regional policies. This project analyzes how ocean and wetlands preservation is omitted from the North American Agreement on Environmental Cooperation, meaning that collaborative efforts under-perform or remain largely sidelined from mainstream issues. As contributors come from a mix of the social and natural sciences (politics, international relations, law studies, sociology, oceanology, and oceanography), this book presents diverse viewpoints on how to address wetlands protection, deep ocean research collaboration, and the marine context of the Sustainable Development Goals.
During the past decade, scientists have learned much about the complex natural processes that influence climate variability and change, and our ability to model climate has increased significantly. We also have begun to better identify those parts of the climate system that are particularly important and not well understood and that therefore limit our ability to project the future evolution of Earth's climate. One of these critical areas is our understanding of the role of feedbacks in the climate system and their role in determining climate sensitivity. Feedbacks are processes in the climate system that can either amplify or dampen the system's response to changed forcings. This study looks at what is known and not known about climate change feedbacks and seeks to identify the feedback processes most in need of improved understanding. It identifies key observations needed to monitor and understand climate feedbacks, discusses ways to evaluate progress in understanding climate feedbacks, recommends ways to improve climate modeling and analysis for climate feedbacks research, and identifies priority areas for research.
Society today may be more vulnerable to global-scale, long-term, climate change than ever before. Even without any human influence, past records show that climate can be expected to continue to undergo considerable change over decades to centuries. Measures for adaption and mitigation will call for policy decisions based on a sound scientific foundation. Better understanding and prediction of climate variations can be achieved most efficiently through a nationally recognized "dec-cen" science plan. This book articulates the scientific issues that must be addressed to advance us efficiently toward that understanding and outlines the data collection and modeling needed.
The 1997 Conference on the World Climate Research Programme to the Third Conference of the Parties of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change concluded that the global capacity to observe the Earth's climate system is inadequate and is deteriorating worldwide. As a result, the chair of the subcommittee of the U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP) requested a National Research Council study to assess the current status of the climate observing capabilities of the United States. This report focuses on existing observing systems for detection and attribution of climate change, with special emphasis on those systems with long time series.
This volume reflects the current state of scientific knowledge about natural climate variability on decade-to-century time scales. It covers a wide range of relevant subjects, including the characteristics of the atmosphere and ocean environments as well as the methods used to describe and analyze them, such as proxy data and numerical models. They clearly demonstrate the range, persistence, and magnitude of climate variability as represented by many different indicators. Not only do natural climate variations have important socioeconomic effects, but they must be better understood before possible anthropogenic effects (from greenhouse gas emissions, for instance) can be evaluated. A topical essay introduces each of the disciplines represented, providing the nonscientist with a perspective on the field and linking the papers to the larger issues in climate research. In its conclusions section, the book evaluates progress in the different areas and makes recommendations for the direction and conduct of future climate research. This book, while consisting of technical papers, is also accessible to the interested layperson.
The U.S. government has pending before it the ratification of the Kyoto Protocol, an agreement to limit the emissions of greenhouse gases (GHGs), which is largely based on the threat GHGs pose to the global climate. Such an agreement would have significant economic and national security implications, and therefore any national policy decisions regarding this issue should rely in part on the best possible suite of scenarios from climate models. The U.S. climate modeling research community is a world leader in intermediate and smaller climate modeling efforts-research that has been instrumental in improving the understanding of specific components of the climate system. Somewhat in contrast, the United States has been less prominent in producing high-end climate modeling results, which have been featured in recent international assessments of the impacts of climate change. The fact that U.S. contributions of these state-of-the-art results have been relatively sparse has prompted a number of prominent climate researchers to question the current organization and support of climate modeling research in the United States, and has led ultimately to this report.