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Climate Change classes 1
UQ 3 May 07 Cars and ozone
UQ 2 Mar 07 Urban air
Climate change 2007 IPCC special
UQ 1 Nov Dec 06 Particles in air
Special: Oct. 2006 Communication
Nr 10 Sept. 2006 Africa's emissions
Nr 9 July 06 Air traffic
Special: June 06 Climate summit
Nr 8 April 2006 Ozone & N2 cycle
Nr 7 March 2006 Climate modeling
R: Global climate estimation
C: How climate models work
C: Simple models
A: Activities
How did the Earth develop?
How will the climate develop?
What can we do?
L: Links
I: Information for teachers
Nr 6 Feb. 2006 acid rain
Nr 5 Jan. 2006 oceanic sulfur
Special: Nov 05 Ozzy Ozone
Nr 4 Oct. 2005 light/satellites
Special: Sept 05 Cyclones
Nr 3 Sept. 2005 methane/energy
Special: July 05 Greenhouse Earth
Nr 2 June 2005 forest/aerosols
No 1 May 2005 vegetation/CO2
     
Activities

Explore a climate model

What can we do?

Test the interactive climate model and answer. Click on the illustrations on this page and enlarge them. It will help you to find the right settings for the model.

 

Now we need to find out what we have to do in order to give recommendations to policy makers. Click for this purpose on the "mitigation" button and choose the option: "Stabilise CO2 emissions". You can choose yourself now with the big cross in the CO2 emissions in which decade we reduce our emissions in the world and what the consequences are for CO2 levels, temperature and climate. If you think we will not manage to stabilise our emissions so soon, follow the scheme below and type in the amount and year by hand.
 

parameters mitigation

Task 9: What are the emissions in 2000? By how much do we have to reduce in order to keep our climate under control? Estimate a value.

The following result is for 1200 Gt C per year in 2200:
 

CO2 emission stabilisation

We see that we can make a lot of assumptions about the development of our world which lead to different outcomes for a future climate. However, differences are not only in the estimations on emissions and other conditions in our world. There are, meanwhile, 15 different global climate models developed in different institutes, which use different mathematical equations and couplings in order to describe the climate system. If you click on the button GCM fit (arrow in yellow) you can compare for a few models what the results would be.

Task 10: Give in 5-6 sentences a final statement: What can we learn from climate models? Why do they show different results? Do you think we should wait until models show better agreement before we change our behaviour?

 

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last updated 13.04.2006 | © ACCENT - Atmospheric Composition Change 2013