Shao Tu's Summary of the last Friday lecture: Brief introduction to climate change &modeling

Given by professor Liong Shie-Yui and his climate team, i think the lecture, named after 'Brief Introduction to climate change', is quite exact, convincing, and inspiring.

At the beginning of the lecture, a scientific definition of climate was given out by Professor Liong, that it is an average of weather over a long time. More details were followed to illustrate the phenomenon of global warming and how it is related to human activity. Two side by side line charts were used here to prove that the global warming is really happening and it is closely related to our human beings.

After this, a method called SRES Scenarios was introduced to help give out a reasonable assumption of what the future climate would look like. Then a few slides were used to explain the IPCC, an organization from which all the data used came from. Furthermore, a quite impressing opinion was pointed out here that the increase in temperature and rising of sea level were expected even after achieving stabilization of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. This indicates that only reducing the emission is not enough, more serious problems were waiting for us.

Lastly, GCM and RCM were introduced as two powerful models to help us analyze the climate change. Still data together with graphs were used to illustrate these two models. Conclusions were drawn that the first hand coarse information from Global Climate Model(GCM) might be not adequate for hydrological models, therefore the downscaling approaches are needed to limit the uncertainties. Anyway, this conclusion itself may seem useless for most of us, but on the other hand it showed us how those scientific data came out and made them for convincing.

As a scientist, large amount of data and graphs were used throughout professor Liong Shie-Yun's lecture, those professional terms and definitions may make it confusing and hard to understand. But once you think it over, you can find its logicality and accuracy, so that you will learn something from it and get inspired by the power of science.