Climate Research Topics: Science
The climate science and policy communities are moving beyond the traditional "one size fits all" products which provide best guesses, towards products which allow for more nuanced approaches. This allows policy makers and climate modellers to do a much better job of quantifying uncertainty in climate forecasts than has been possible under traditional approaches. In particular, probabilistic approaches allow us to explore a more representative range of possible future climates, and may permit meaningful calculations of risk. These developments in turn open up interesting new ways to examine interactions between the human decisions and the climate response on timescales from decades to centuries.
Current Projects
- Climateprediction.net
1999 - present
The worlds largest experiment to try and produce a forecast of the climate in the 21st century using the power from ordinary pc's.
- Avoided Deforestation.
Ongoing
ECI plays a leading role in understanding the dynamics and ecology of such forests, and is involved in large-scale monitoring projects within the Amazon region to better understand the ecological and climatological changes taking place in these important regions.
- Atmosphere - biosphere interactions in the Amazon
The ECI's Ecosystems research theme is undertaking a number of projects to further scientific understanding of biosphere - atmosphere interactions in tropical forests.
Archived Projects
- International Protocol on Climate Change: From Uncertain to Unequivocal.
2007
ECI have published two critiques of the IPCC process, which ask whether their findings tell us much about how policy should be applied
- How discourses influence environmental science, policy and practice
Sep 2007
Discourses shape oft-contested interactions across space and time, and articulate knowledge and power. A number of ECI projects examine these interactions.
- Climate Response
Mar 06 - Mar 08
How do uncertainties in predictions of global climate change models affect climate policy?
More climate science projects are carried out within the School of Geography and the Environment (SoGE) Climate Systems and Policy research cluster.