Climate Measurement and Modeling

Having considered the sun and its variations, we now turn to Earth’s climate and climatic variations. We examine the definition of climate and the difficulties in measuring it. Awareness of these complexities is critical for an appreciation of how difficult it is to demonstrate changing climate. Separating trends from random variations is the first step in defining climate change. After reviewing the statistical properties of climate, we deal with theoretical climate models. This background is important for understanding how solar variations might affect climate. The following four chapters review specific sun/climate relationships, and the statistical and physical guidelines developed now will be used to select pertinent studies. As the heat source that drives Earth’s climate, the variable sun is important when studying climate change. With many, if not most, modern popular accounts focusing on how humanity is altering climate, it is important to realize that solar variations may play a significant role in the background natural variability. To understand anthropogenic (human-made) influences on climate change, we must be able to make distinctions among the contributions that arise from naturally occurring climate variability. Natural climate variations include a possible solar-irradiance component. Man-made climatic changes are not well known, and natural climate variations are uncertain too. For example, we do not know whether a man-made doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide provides a 1.5 or a 4.5 °C increase in mean global temperature. This uncertainty arises, in part, because natural climate variability acts as “noise” to confuse our measures of man-made influences. To obtain accurate results, we must understand and remove these background noise sources. Although these temperature changes seem small, they can have tremendous global impact on the survivability of species and on many different aspects of life. In addition, the uncertainty factor of 3 is highly important because it tells us that the risk in emitting a quantity of carbon dioxide is uncertain by this same factor.