nízkácitlivostklimatuadalínepíjemnépravdy.docVIP

Low climate sensitivity and other inconvenient truths Dr. Lubo? Motl, The CEP Climate Conference, November 15th, 2007 This Word file’s URL: /cep-eng.doc The Czech version: /cep.doc The Czech PowerPoint version: /cep.ppt The plan of the talk about the scientific basics of the climate change debate Climate phenomena since geological eras Ice ages and carbon dioxide Introduction to the greenhouse effect Clouds respond: climate sensitivity, a definition The effect of CO2 molecules is slowing down Processes in the oceans The impact of solar activity and cosmic rays putting effects together The consequences for ice sheets and ecosystems: an appraisal of known insights Climate at various time scales The temperature is changing every day because days and nights alternate. Seasons make it change many times a year. However, there also exists an extensive set of processes that influence the temperature at even longer time scales. Some of them are periodic, some of them are irregular. Some of them are predictable and understood, others remain mysterious. We will look at some of them. For example, when the climate is observed at time intervals as long as a billion of years, the continental drift becomes essential for a correct prediction of the climate on individual continents. Surprisingly, even the motion of the Solar System within the Milky Way is an important driver of the average climate on Earth at the time scale of hundreds of millions of years. Fig 1: The Milky Way Figure 1 shows a sketch of our Galaxy. The Solar System is located somewhere in the middle between the galactic center and its boundary. Dynamics of stars inside the Galaxy is non-linear and complicated. One of its consequences is that stars, including the Sun, are sometimes located inside one of the spiral arms and sometimes in between them. One cycle takes about 140 million years: it is the time needed for the Sun to “bubble” through the Galaxy into the a