The Climate Dilemma

Abstract

Climate has become one of the most topical issues over the last two to three decades. It has graduated from the status of obscure scientific debate to that of a global geopolitical issue. Climate itself is a sophisticated concept that is somewhat different to that used or discussed in everyday life. The basic nature of the globe’s climate is regulated by the global energy balance, as are the principal climate mechanisms. These in turn are modulated via the complex nonlinear interactions between the components that comprise the global climate system. These non-linear interactions generate an intense variability in climate that makes detection of small, secular trends in climate very difficult. The increase of carbon dioxide and surface temperatures is now being established as a fact, but the attribution of the temperature increase to carbon dioxide increases is a complex challenge. Due to constraints imposed by the current level of climate modeling technology we cannot perform crucial experiments in climate science. Accordingly we have to rely on a combination of numerical experiments, often with a considerable degree of parameterization of key climate processes and consensus among experts to reach provisional explanations concerning the causes, magnitude and intensity of climate change. Although the scientific research procedure is incremental in nature, the process of data collection, experimentation and verification of modeling outcomes, results in the steady accumulation of knowledge. It is this knowledge on which we rely for drawing conclusions about the state of the globe’s climate and that policy makers use in drawing up recommendations related to mitigation of and adaptation to climatic variability and change.