2.2: Climate Change
Unravel the mysteries of Earth’s changing climate and protect our living planet. Other Information:
We are making progress in measuring and modeling changes in climate. This is no simple matter given the complex interactions
of air, land, and ocean processes that affect climate. Despite our progress, we still cannot definitively distinguish between
natural and human-caused climate changes, we do not fully understand the effects and roles of clouds and aerosols on climate,
and we have limited ability to predict regional effects. More importantly, we have only begun to explore ways to mitigate
and/or adapt to these effects. Ultimately, we need to be able to understand the factors that determine Earth’s climate well
enough to predict climate and climate impacts decades, or even centuries, in the future. We are developing the novel research
tools, models, and integrated experiments and computational science to find the answers. Our strategy includes the following
emphases: • Determine the effects of clouds and aerosols on climate, in particular their interactions with long-wave radiation,
how and where clouds form and dissipate in the atmosphere, and how changes in clouds and aerosol distributions alter the Earth’s
radiation balance. • Predict future climate at regional scales, advancing mathematics and computation to simulate the dynamics,
chemistry, and biology of the Earth system on decade to century time scales. • Distinguish natural and humancaused climate
change based on improved climate models that more accurately reflect changes in radiative forcing due to increases in greenhouse
gases and aerosols in the atmosphere. • Understand and enhance Nature’s processes for sequestering atmospheric carbon from
fossil fuel use, including the capacity of terrestrial and oceanic ecosystems and opportunities to capitalize on the biophysical
and biochemical mechanisms that control uptake in plants, soils, and ocean plankton. • Determine how ecosystems respond to
environmental change, developing a theoretical and empirical basis spanning molecular interactions to whole ecosystems. •
Predict and assess the effects of climate change based on models of human actions and costs and benefits of alternatives for
mitigation and adaptation.
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