From stormier weather to a longer growing season in some areas to the expansion of the ranges of insect-borne diseases and migratory animals, climate change is being felt throughout the Earth. Tracking these changes, and learning about the ways that humans are already impacted by them, is the focus of research conducted across a wide spectrum of Earth science disciplines (e.g., meteorology, biology, geography and anthropology).
In order to understand and predict the workings of the global climate system—encompassing the atmosphere, oceans, land and ice sheets—scientists employ a variety of theoretical knowledge and mathematical modeling techniques. They build computer models that simulate the large-scale motions that shape paradigmatic climate variables, such as temperature and rainfall. These models draw upon established laws of physics and the latest understandings of the physical, chemical and biological processes that govern Earth’s systems.
Data collection is an essential aspect of all climate research, and producing datasets useful to the scientific community can be challenging. To construct global surface temperatures, for example, thousands of individual station records must be merged, subjected to procedures for quality control, homogenized and transformed to a grid. These processions can take a long time, and in the meantime, new observations are continually being made.
Identifying the causes of observed changes in the climate system requires a statistical estimation of how much the change might have occurred due to internal variability alone, without consideration for other factors. This process of detection is known as attribution. Attribution can be done via basic physical reasoning—examining the likelihood that a particular change might occur for a given reason—and through quantitative studies using GCMs/ESMs that simulate what would happen if one causal factor was changed while other factors were held constant, and then identify the simulated pattern of change in a target variable or field as the “fingerprint” of that cause.
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