Provides students with a solid foundation in climate science, with which to understand global warming, natural climate variations, and climate models. As climate models are one of our primary tools for predicting and adapting to climate change, it is vital we appreciate their strengths and limitations. Also key is understanding what aspects of climate science are well understood and where quantitative uncertainties arise. This textbook will inform the future users of climate models and the decision-makers of tomorrow by providing the depth they need, while requiring no background in atmospheric science and only basic calculus and physics. Developed from a course that the author teaches at UCLA, material has been extensively class-tested and with online resources of colour figures, Powerpoint slides, and problem sets, this is a complete package for students across all sciences wishing to gain a solid grounding in climate science.

This book demystifies the models we use to simulate present and future climates, allowing readers to better understand how to use climate model results. In order to predict the future trajectory of the Earth’s climate, climate-system simulation models are necessary. When and how do we trust climate model predictions? The book offers a framework for answering this question. It provides readers with a basic primer on climate and climate change, and offers non-technical explanations for how climate models are constructed, why they are uncertain, and what level of confidence we should place in them. It presents current results and the key uncertainties concerning them. Uncertainty is not a weakness but understanding uncertainty is a strength and a key part of using any model, including climate models. Case studies of how climate model output has been used and how it might be used in the future are provided. The ultimate goal of this book is to promote a better understanding of the structure and uncertainties of climate models among users, including scientists, engineers and policymakers.

This edited collection of works by leading climate scientists and philosophers introduces readers to issues in the foundations, evaluation, confirmation, and application of climate models. It engages with important topics directly affecting public policy, including the role of doubt, the use of satellite data, and the robustness of models. Climate Modelling provides an early and significant contribution to the burgeoning Philosophy of Climate Science field that will help to shape our understanding of these topics in both philosophy and the wider scientific context. It offers insight into the reasons we should believe what climate models say about the world but addresses the issues that inform how reliable and well-confirmed these models are. This book will be of interest to students of climate science, philosophy of science, and of particular relevance to policy makers who depend on the models that forecast future states of the climate and ocean in order to make public policy decisions.

This title contains 25 invited chapters that present the most current thinking on the environmental mechanisms contributing to global climate change and explore scientifically grounded steps to reduce the buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

A three-tier approach is presented: (i) fundamental dynamical concepts of climate processes, (ii) their mathematical formulation based on balance equations, and (iii) the necessary numerical techniques to solve these equations. This book showcases the global energy balance of the climate system and feedback processes that determine the climate sensitivity, initial-boundary value problems, energy transport in the climate system, large-scale ocean circulation and abrupt climate change.

Syukuro Manabe is perhaps the leading pioneer of modern climate modeling. Beyond Global Warming is his compelling firsthand account of how the scientific community came to understand the human causes of climate change, and how numerical models using the world's most powerful computers have been instrumental to these vital discoveries. Joined here by atmospheric scientist Anthony Broccoli, Manabe shows how climate models have been used as virtual laboratories for examining the complex planetary interactions of atmosphere, ocean, and land. Manabe and Broccoli use these studies as the basis for a broader discussion of human-induced global warming--and what the future may hold for a warming planet. They tell the stories of early trailblazers such as Svante Arrhenius, the legendary Swedish scientist who created the first climate model of Earth more than a century ago, and provide rare insights into Manabe's own groundbreaking work over the past five decades. Expertly walking readers through key breakthroughs, they explain why increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide has caused temperatures to rise in the troposphere yet fall in the stratosphere, why the warming of the planet's surface differs by hemisphere, why drought is becoming more frequent in arid regions despite the global increase in precipitation, and much more.

Provides an essential introduction to modeling terrestrial ecosystems in Earth system models for graduate students and researchers.

In response to a request from Congress, Surface Temperature Reconstructions for the Last 2,000 Years assesses the state of scientific efforts to reconstruct surface temperature records for Earth during approximately the last 2,000 years and the implications of these efforts for our understanding of global climate change. Because widespread, reliable temperature records are available only for the last 150 years, scientists estimate temperatures in the more distant past by analyzing "proxy evidence," which includes tree rings, corals, ocean and lake sediments, cave deposits, ice cores, boreholes, and glaciers. Starting in the late 1990s, scientists began using sophisticated methods to combine proxy evidence from many different locations in an effort to estimate surface temperature changes during the last few hundred to few thousand years. This book is an important resource in helping to understand the intricacies of global climate change.

The physics and dynamics of the atmosphere and atmosphere-ocean interactions provide the foundation of modern climate models, upon which our understanding of the chemistry and biology of ocean and land surface processes are built. Originally published in 2006, Frontiers of Climate Modeling captures developments in modeling the atmosphere, and their implications for our understanding of climate change, whether due to natural or anthropogenic causes. Emphasis is on elucidating how greenhouse gases and aerosols are altering the radiative forcing of the climate system and the sensitivity of the system to such perturbations. An expert team of authors address key aspects of the atmospheric greenhouse effect, clouds, aerosols, atmospheric radiative transfer, deep convection dynamics, large scale ocean dynamics, stratosphere-troposphere interactions, and coupled ocean-atmosphere model development. The book is an important reference for researchers and advanced students interested in the forces driving the climate system and how they are modeled by climate scientists.

An introduction to the complex world of climate models that explains why we should trust their predictions despite the uncertainties.