Journal of Earth Science & Climatic Change
Open Access

Abstract

The emissions of greenhouse gases due to human influences has caused perturbations in the Earth system, initiating major changes in the greenhouse effect and leading to global warming. Other factors such as aerosol emissions and land-use change also due to human activity, along with changes in solar radiation and volcanic eruptions causing aerosol increases, have also affected the planetary heat balance. In this presentation, we discuss how each of the natural and anthropogenic factors has contributed to alteration of the Earth system from global to continental to regional scales. The climate variables of particular interest for societal impacts are temperature, precipitation, and weather extremes. For this investigation, we use state-of-the-art numerical models of the climate system that were employed in the Fifth Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Assessment (2013), together with observations drawn from multiple platforms (surface, satellite, aircraft). We analyze the key drivers over the 20th Century, the impacts they have generated, and the unresolved issues. We then explore the impacts that are expected in the 21st Century. In the context of both the 20th and 21st Centuries, we discuss the impacts expected due to global warming and the significance of the resulting climate change for extremes in weather, e.g., heat waves, tropical storms, sea-level rise, forest fires, droughts, excess rainfall. This brings to the fore the connection between the scientific understanding of global warming based on rigor and the manner in which climate change impacts society, including that arising due to the nonstationary behavior of the changes.

Biography

V Ramaswamy is the Director of the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory/NOAA, located in Princeton (New Jersey), USA. He has published more than 150 peer-reviewed papers, won prestigious awards, and has been a Coordinating Lead Author on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Working Group I reports, and has been a Vice-Chair of the Joint Scientific Committee of the World Climate Reserach Program. He is also a Lecturer with the rank of Professor in the Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences Program at Princeton University (USA), and teaches a popular graduate course in Atmospheric Physics.

Email: v.ramaswamy@noaa.gov