The climate demon : past, present, and future of climate prediction / R. Saravanan, Texas A&M University.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Saravanan, R. (Ramalingam), author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Weather forecasting--Research.

Weather forecasting.

Climatology--Research.

Climatology.

Weather forecasting--Computer simulation.

Weather forecasting--Mathematical models.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (xvii, 379 pages) : digital, PDF file(s).

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2022.

Summary:

Climate predictions - and the computer models behind them - play a key role in shaping public opinion and our response to the climate crisis. Some people interpret these predictions as 'prophecies of doom' and some others dismiss them as mere speculation, but the vast majority are only vaguely aware of the science behind them. This book gives a balanced view of the strengths and limitations of climate modeling. It covers historical developments, current challenges, and future trends in the field. The accessible discussion of climate modeling only requires a basic knowledge of science. Uncertainties in climate predictions and their implications for assessing climate risk are analyzed, as are the computational challenges faced by future models. The book concludes by highlighting the dangers of climate 'doomism', while also making clear the value of predictive models, and the severe and very real risks posed by anthropogenic climate change.

Contents:

Cover

Half-title

Title page

Copyright information

Dedication

Contents

List of Figures

Preface

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Purpose of the Book

Structure of the Book

1 Deducing Weather: The Dawn of Computing

1.1 From Sunspot Cycles to Compute Cycles

1.2 Philosophy Break: Inductivism versus Deductivism

1.3 The Weatherperson and the Computer

1.4 The Dark Side of Weather Prediction

2 Predicting Weather: The Butterfly and the Tornado

2.1 Philosophy Break: Laplace's Demon, Determinism, and Paradigm Shifts

2.2 Atmospheric Data: Sharing Selfies on the WWW

2.3 The Assimilation of Data

2.4 The Butterfly Effect

2.5 An Ensemble of Demons

2.6 The Infinite Forecast

3 The Greenhouse Effect: Goldilocks and the Three Planets

3.1 Lessons from a Hot Summer Day: Radiation, Albedo, and Convection

3.2 Lessons from a Cold Winter Night: Greenhouse Effect and Climate Sensitivity

3.3 Eunice Foote and the Three Glass Tube Experiments

3.4 Arrhenius and the First Climate Model

3.5 Climate Feedbacks and Forcings

3.6 Too Hot, Too Cold, and Just Right

4 Deducing Climate: Smagorinsky's Laboratory

4.1 General Circulation of the Atmosphere

4.2 From Tokyo with Meteorology

4.3 Three-Dimensional Climate Modeling

4.4 Philosophy Break: Reductionism and Emergentism

4.5 Models of Simplicity in the Garden of Complexity

4.6 Flywheel of Climate: The Circulating Ocean

5 Predicting Climate: Butterflies in the Greenhouse

5.1 Nature versus Nurture: Initial and Boundary Conditions

5.2 Far from the Madding Crowd: The Keeling Curve

5.3 It Takes Two to Tango: Carbon Dioxide and Temperature

5.4 Academia Warms to Global Warming

6 The Ozone Hole: Black Swan at the Polar Dawn

6.1 The Ozone Layer: Earth's Sunscreen

6.2 The Road to Ozone Depletion.

6.3 Cloudy Skies in the Polar Night

6.4 Patching the Hole: Ozone Recovery and Climate Change

7 Global Warming: From Gown to Town

7.1 Assessing Climate Change

7.2 Howcatchem: The Attribution of Recent Climate Change

7.3 Extreme Weather Attribution: The Butterfly Did It?

7.4 The Minuscule but Mighty Aerosol

7.5 Internal Variability: Much Ado about a Hiatus

7.6 Storylines, Scenarios, and Projections

7.7 Warming Globally, Impacting Locally

8 Occam's Razor: The Reduction to Simplicity

8.1 Philosophy Break: The Principle of Parsimony

8.2 Predicting versus Understanding: Complexity versus Simplicity

8.3 Biology Analogy: The Fruit Fly Model of Climate

8.4 Spherical Cows and Tipping Points

9 Constraining Climate: A Conservative View of Modeling

9.1 Conservation of Mass and Energy

9.2 Flux Adjustment and Non-Conservation

9.3 Community Climate Modeling

9.4 Earth System Models: Carbon Cycles and More

9.5 Better Models, More Uncertainty?

9.6 Predictive, Constraining, and Explanatory Power

10 Tuning Climate: A Comedy of Compensating Errors

10.1 Model Tuning: Orchestra or Whack-a-Mole?

10.2 Correctness, Confirmability, and Usefulness of Models

11 Occam's Beard: The Emergence of Complexity

11.1 The Anna Karenina Principle

11.2 An Ensemble of Climate Demons

11.3 Herd Mentality and Model Diversity

11.4 Catch-22: Reproducibility and Replicability

12 The Hansen Paradox: The Red Queen's Race of Climate Modeling

12.1 Falsifiability of Climate Models

12.2 Harder than Rocket Science: Numerical Convergence and Climate Modeling

12.3 Carroll, Borges, and the Reducibility Limit

13 The Rumsfeld Matrix: Degrees of Knowledge

13.1 The Arc of Model Improvement

13.2 Benefits of Parameterizations: Downstream versus Upstream

13.3 Contrarians at the Gate.

13.4 Unknown Knowns: The Threat of Willful Ignorance

13.5 Means, Motive, and Opportunity - Or the Lack Thereof

13.6 Contrarianism and Unconstrained Ideation

13.7 Howaboutism: Getting down in the Trenches

14 Lost in Translation

14.1 What Is a Model?

14.2 What Is Data?

14.3 Models versus Data: The Problem of Induction

14.4 What is ''Business as Usual''?

14.5 What Is Prediction?

15 Taking Climate Models Seriously, Not Literally

15.1 Deep Uncertainty: When Error Bars Have Error Bars

15.2 Precision versus Accuracy: Degrees of Warming

15.3 Pitfalls of the Uncertainty Trough

15.4 ''OK Doomer'': The Power of Numeric Prophecies

16 Moore's Law: To Exascale and Beyond

16.1 Making Chips That Don't Fry

16.2 A Brief History of Supercomputing

16.3 Chip Wars: March of the GPUs

16.4 Topping the Computing Charts

16.5 Care and Feeding of the Growing Climate Demon: Economics and Energetics

17 Machine Learning: The Climate Imitation Game

17.1 Can Machines Learn?

17.2 Model Wars: Inductivism Strikes Back

17.3 Mapping the Landscape of Models

18 Geoengineering: Reducing the Fever

18.1 How to Train the Climate Demon

18.2 Sulfates in the Sky

19 Pascal's Wager: Hedging Our Climate Bets

19.1 An Actuarial Approach to Long-Term Climate Change Risk

19.2 Blowin' in the Wind: Reasoning through the Fog of Numbers

19.3 Planning for the Future: Spanning the Uncertainties

19.4 Assessing Climate Risk: The Difficulties with Probabilities

20 Moonwalking into the Future

20.1 The Paris Potluck

Epilogue

Glossary

Notes

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18.

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Select Bibliography

References

Index.

Notes:

Title from publisher's bibliographic system (viewed on 02 Nov 2021).

ISBN:

9781009040051

1009040057

9781009039604

1009039601

OCLC:

1481790748