Climate change – it’s all about probability

Abstract: The assessment of present-day and future climate change is of crucial socio-economic and ecological importance but, at the same time, subject to a variety of uncertainty factors that are partly inherent to the climate system. This implies that a statement about the Earth’s future climate is definitely a probabilistic one. From a scientific point of view, probabilistic statements require the knowledge of the probability density function (PDF) of the underlying process. In this paper, we expose what we already know of the characteristics of such PDFs of climate change from coordinated climate modelling initiatives and what probabilistic statements can be derived from the quantification and evaluation of climate change in a regional and seasonal context. The first aspect addresses the changing occurrence of heat events with a relatively long return period in past climate. It turns out that particularly warm years, which only occurred once every 40 years in the past, will become typica.... https://www.erdkunde.uni-bonn.de/article/view/2728

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• Location: Deutsche Nationalbibliothek Frankfurt am Main
• Extent: Online-Ressource
• Language: Englisch

References and Relationships

• Bibliographic citation: Climate change – it’s all about probability ; volume:67 ; number:3 ; year:2013 ; Erdkunde ; 67, Heft 3 (2013)

Contributors, Places and Time

• Creator: Paeth, Heiko ; Steger, Christian ; Merkenschlager, Christian

Further information

• DOI: 10.3112/erdkunde.2013.03.01
• URN: urn:nbn:de:101:1-2410281801271.302816314949
• Rights: Open Access; Der Zugriff auf das Objekt ist unbeschränkt möglich.