Climate Change 101:

An Introduction to Climate
Change Science

Thomas C. Peterson

NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center

Asheville, North Carolina

March 12, 2007 Climate Change 101 1

 Outline of the talk:
• The nature of science
• The greenhouse effect
• The physics of climate change
• Global climate models
• Climate change detection and attribution
• Common questions
• Concluding comments

March 12, 2007 Climate Change 101 2

 The nature of science
• . . . science, which I define as a set of
methods designed to describe and
interpret observed or inferred phenomena,
past or present, and aimed at building a
testable body of knowledge open to
rejection or confirmation. In other words,
science is a specific way of analyzing
information with the goal of testing claims.
– Michael Shermer, director of Skeptics
Society, 1997

March 12, 2007 Climate Change 101 3

Science is never 100% certain

• Science does not deal in certainty, so

“fact” can only mean a proposition
affirmed to such a high degree that
it would be perverse to withhold one’s
provisional assent.
– Stephen Jay Gould, geologist, 1999

March 12, 2007 Climate Change 101 4

 Science is self-correcting
• In practice, contemporary scientists
usually submit their research findings
to the scrutiny of their peers, which
includes disclosing the methods and
data which they use, so that their
results can be checked through
replication by other scientists.
– IPCC 4th Assessment Report, 2007

March 12, 2007 Climate Change 101 5

 Competing claims, information, and
even misinformation can be assessed
• Testability
– Can it be proved false?
• Fruitfulness
– Does it yield observable surprising predictions?
• Scope
– How many different phenomena does it explain?
• Simplicity
– How many assumptions does it make?
• Conservatism
– Is it consistent with our well founded beliefs?
• Theodore Schick, Jr. & Lewis Vaughn, philosophers,
2001

March 12, 2007 Climate Change 101 6

March 12, 2007 Climate Change 101 7
We need the greenhouse effect

• The Earth’s surface temperature is

~60ºF
• Without the greenhouse effect it
would be ~5ºF
• But humans are changing the radiative
properties of the atmosphere and
thereby the greenhouse effect

March 12, 2007 Climate Change 101 8

 Climate Forcing Summary

From Ravishankara (2006)

Warming versus cooling effects are like the tortoise versus the hare.
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Do you believe in global
warming?

• I believe in quantum physics.

March 12, 2007 Climate Change 101 10

 Quantum physics tells us that
• Infrared (IR) energy can only be absorbed
and radiated in very small particle-like
packets of energy called quanta

March 12, 2007 Climate Change 101 11

 Quantum physics tells us that
• Infrared (IR) energy can only be absorbed
and radiated in very small particle-like
packets of energy called quanta
• Each molecule can absorb and radiate
quanta at different wavelengths

March 12, 2007 Climate Change 101 12

 Quantum physics tells us that
• Infrared (IR) energy can only be absorbed
and radiated in very small particle-like
packets of energy called quanta
• Each molecule can absorb and radiate
quanta at different wavelengths
• Two atom molecules can absorb very little
IR energy
– E.g., Nitrogen (N2) and Oxygen (O2)
• 98% of the atmosphere

March 12, 2007 Climate Change 101 13

 Quantum physics tells us that
• Infrared (IR) energy can only be absorbed
and radiated in very small particle-like
packets of energy called quanta
• Each molecule can absorb and radiate
quanta at different wavelengths
• Two atom molecules can absorb very little
IR energy
– E.g., Nitrogen (N2) and Oxygen (O2)
• 98% of the atmosphere
• Three or more atom molecules do absorb
and radiate in the IR
– E.g., Carbon Dioxide (CO2), water vapor (H2O),
methane (CH4)
• 2% of the atmosphere
• CO2 only 0.04% of the atmosphere
March 12, 2007 Climate Change 101 14
 Global climate models
• Computer
generated
numerical
simulations of
the climate
system

March 12, 2007 Climate Change 101 15

 Climate change detection and
attribution

• Often linked together but are two

separate processes
• Very mathematically intensive
– Involves the temporal and spatial
patterns of climate change
– So this description is quite simplified

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 Climate change detection
• Examine the instrumental temperature record
for the last 100 years
• Examine the paleoclimate record for the past
1000 or 2000 years
• Examine climate model control runs
– No changes in forcing
– Run for 10,000s of years
• Is the recent observed climate change outside
the bounds of natural climate variability?

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Yes, the recent observed climate
change is beyond the bounds of
natural variability

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Attribution: What is the cause of
the detected climate change?
• Attribution is primarily model based
analysis
• What mix of forcings is required to
create the detected climate change?

March 12, 2007 Climate Change 101 19

 Attribution example: Most of the
warming over the past 50 years is likely
due to greenhouse gas increases

March 12, 2007 Climate Change 101

IPCC TAR
20
 Are CO2 and other greenhouse
gasses really responsible for
changing the global temperature?

• Quantum physics says we should

expect them to be

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 Are CO2 and other greenhouse
gasses really responsible for
changing the global temperature?

• Climate models say they are

March 12, 2007 Climate Change 101 22

 Are CO2 and other greenhouse
gasses really responsible for
changing the global temperature?
• Historical observations indicate they are
related

March 12, 2007 Climate Change 101 23

 Are CO2 and other greenhouse
gasses really responsible for
changing the global temperature?
• Ice cores can give us the long view

March 12, 2007 Climate Change 101 24

 Are CO2 and other greenhouse
gasses really responsible for
changing the global temperature?
• The long view says they are definitely related

March 12, 2007 Climate Change 101 25

 Common questions

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You can’t predict the weather 10 days in
advance, how can you predict the climate
100 years from now?
• Weather forecasting
and climate
projections are very
different
– Weather forecasting
is primarily based
movements and
interactions of After Kiehl and Trenberth (1997)
weather parameters – Climate projections are primarily based on
• Predicting a storm 1 the physics of long-term changes in solar
day late is an error energy and infrared radiation
• The same climate physics that allow us to
100% accurately predict that next summer
will be warmer than next winter
March 12, 2007 Climate Change 101 27
Don’t urban heat islands – hot local temperatures
caused by buildings and concrete- make U.S. and
global temperatures unreliable?
• No
• The urban effect is
minor with land data
• Ocean data has no
urban effect and
shows warming
• Increasing
temperatures
supported by:
– plant bloom dates
– Lake/river
freeze/thaw dates
– Glaciers melting
Peterson and Owen (2005) – Etc.

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Additional supporting evidence:
the shrinking Arctic sea-ice

March 12, 2007 Climate Change 101 29

Don’t satellites show no warming?

• One satellite data set

did several years ago
• As another group
tried to reproduce it,
an error in the data
processing was
discovered
• Both satellite and
surface data
currently show
warming

March 12, 2007 Climate Change 101 30

 What are the climate
projections for my area?

• Models aren’t accurate at city level

• But can use projections for a large region
such as the Eastern US
• Projections are not from the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
(IPCC)
• But based on all the models that were run
to contribute to the IPCC
– Over 25 models
– Three emission scenarios

March 12, 2007 Climate Change 101 31

 Precipitation

March 12, 2007 Climate Change 101 32

 Total precipitation:

1σ = ~68%
2σ = ~95%

March 12, 2007 From Peterson et al., 2007b Climate Change 101 33
 Precipitation projections:
• Total
precipitation
very uncertain
• However,
models
project heavy
precipitation
will increase
Created for a report due to be released in late 2007.

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 Temperature

March 12, 2007 Climate Change 101 35

 Low CO2 scenario

March 12, 2007 From Peterson et al., 2007b Climate Change 101 36
Mid-range CO2 increases

March 12, 2007 From Peterson et al., 2007b Climate Change 101 37
 Business as usual CO2

March 12, 2007 From Peterson et al., 2007b Climate Change 101 38
 Temperature projections

• Projections show more change in the

future than recently observed
• Even if we stopped emitting CO2 now
there would still be warming for the
next few decades
• How warm it will be 100 years from
now is dependent on future emissions
of greenhouse gases

March 12, 2007 Climate Change 101 39

 Does anthropogenic global
warming pass the rating criteria?
• Testability
– Can it be proved false?
• Yes, the last decade could have been cold, laboratory tests on CO 2
could have proven theory wrong
• Fruitfulness
– Does it yield observable surprising predictions?
• Yes, predicts increase in heavy precipitation which has been
observed
• Scope
– How many different phenomena does it explain?
• Changes in temperature, precipitation, atmospheric circulation,
storms, mountain glacier melting, arctic sea-ice melting, etc.
• Simplicity
– How many assumptions does it make?
• None, based on quantum physics
• Conservatism
– Is it consistent with our well founded beliefs?
• Yes, no previously unknown phenomena are required to explain it

March 12, 2007 Climate Change 101 40

 Ockham’s razor
• 14th Century English Franciscan friar and
philosopher William of Ockham developed this
principle:
– All things being equal, the simplest solution tends to
be the best one.
• Greenhouse gases warming the planet is simple
• Alternate climate change explanations are not
– Require ignoring CO2’s radiative effect
– Paying attention to unproven explanations
» It is just part of a natural cycle (that doesn’t show up in
the paleoclimate record)
» It is all due to changes in solar geomagnetism
» It is all due to urban contamination of data sets
» A negative feedback like the cloud-iris effect will save us
» It is all due to cosmic rays
» Etc.
March 12, 2007 Climate Change 101 41
 Final comment

• Stepping out into record hot weather, a

friend who is an expert on climate change
detection and attribution was asked if the
high temperatures they were experiencing
were due to global warming
• He responded:
– You can’t attribute any one day’s temperature
to global warming
– But unusually warm weather like that does give
us the privilege of experiencing the weather we
are bequeathing our children and grandchildren

March 12, 2007 Climate Change 101 42

 Selected References

• Kiehl, J., and K. Trenberth, 1997: Earth’s annual global

mean energy budget. Bull. Amer. Meteor. Soc., 78, 197-
206.
• Peterson, Thomas C. and Timothy W. Owen, 2005: Urban
Heat Island Assessment: Metadata are Important.
Journal of Climate, 18, 2637-2646.
• Peterson, Thomas C., Xuebin Zhang, Manola Brunet India,
Jorge Luis Vázquez Aguirre, 2007a: Changes in North
American extremes derived from daily weather data.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, in
preparation.
• Peterson, Thomas C., Marjorie McGuirk, Tamara G.
Houston, Andrew H. Horvitz and Michael F. Wehner,
2007b: Climate Variability and Change with Implications
for Transportation, National Research Council, in press.

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