Refreshments at 10:30 am

• Main Author: R. A. Pielke Sr
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Subjects: Ice Sheet
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.595.8079; http://www.asp.ucar.edu/seminars/seminarfiles/pielke12-14-05.pdf

What is the climate system and how are we altering it? The conventional view of the climate has been that it represents long term statistics of weather. However, this narrow view has hindered our understanding of natural- and human-caused climate variability and change. My presentation will overview the framework of the climate system as articulated in the 2005 National Research Report "Radiative forcing of climate change: Expanding the concept and addressing uncertainties" in which climate is described as involving land, atmosphere, ocean, and continental ice sheet forcings and feedbacks. Physical, chemical and biological processes are involved. I will present examples from our research that demonstrate the need for this more inclusive definition of climate, which has been lacking in national and international assessments such as the IPCC (Pielke, 2002). Among the conclusions, as we discuss in Rial et al (2004), is the increasingly recognized nonlinear complexity of climate variability and change, such that skillful prediction decades into the future may not be possible. There is also a need to focus on regional scales, rather than on global- or zonal-averages. We have developed an alternate paradigm based on a vulnerability perspective (Pielke, 2004; Pielke et al, 2005) which is a more useful framework to transmit risks to important societal and environmental resources. The talk concludes with a summary of recent problems with the assessment of surface and tropospheric temperature trends, and of my experiences on communicating views on climate science within the scientific community and to the public. The weblog that I launched in early July 2005