It has been a long-standing question whether climate change can be traced back to human activities. In order to answer it more precisely and to identify possible future developments more reliably, it is necessary to understand the underlying physical processes in even greater detail.
Which climate effects do clouds have? Under what conditions do they warm or cool the atmosphere? And what role do clouds play in shaping the atmospheric circulation, and hence help maintain the environment in which they grow?
The new study "Rethinking the lower bound on aerosol forcing" in the Journal of Climate, written by Prof. Bjorn Stevens, director at the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology (MPI-M) and head of the department "The Atmosphere in the Earth System", presents a number of arguments as to why the cooling effect of aerosols is neither as strong nor as uncertain as has previously been thought.
Observations suggest a hiatus in global surface temperature since 1998, whereas most climate models simulate continued warming. What causes this difference? Do climate models respond too sensitively to the increase in greenhouse-gas concentrations such as that of CO2, and thus overestimate climate change systematically? Or has the discrepancy arisen by chance? A study just published by the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology (MPI-M) gives a clear answer: There is no evidence for systematic…
In a new study, published in Nature Geoscience, Prof. Dr. Martin Claussen, director of the department "The Land in the Earth System" at the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology (MPI-M), and researchers of his team analysed to what extent plant diversity influences the stability of climate-vegetation interaction.
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