Climate Change: Past, Present and Future, or What Can Past Ice Ages Tell Us About Future Warming?

About the Presentation

The talk will start with a summary of the conclusions of the IPCC’s Nobel-prize winning Fourth Assessment Report, and discuss the remaining uncertainties in future climate evolution. It will present the components of the climate system and their interactions in a simple but precise fashion, and show how these interactions generate self-sustained, internal variability of the climate system on all time scales. Next, the way this internal variability interacts, in turn, with small external forcing will be shown to lead to large-amplitude, irregular glaciation cycles. The conclusions will point to the way that the small, but significant anthropogenic forcing also interacts with inter-annual, inter-decadal and secular variability of the climate system to produce the complex record of recent climate and how this might affect future climate evolution.

About the Speaker

Michael Ghil is a founder of the modern discipline of climate dynamics, with an emphasis on its nonlinear and complex aspects. He is the author, editor or co-author of a dozen books and over 250 research and review papers, and has held several positions of academic and national science leadership in the USA and France. Prof. Ghil is currently the Head of the Geosciences Department at the ENS, and founder of its Environmental Research and Teaching Institute (CERES-ERTI). Member of the Academia Europaea and of several national academies, his interests cover the atmosphere, ocean and coupled climate system, but also several other fields and disciplines, including celestial mechanics, macro- and micro-economics, and complex systems in general.

Location

The Aurelio Peccei Lecture-Event will take place at
The Royal Academy of Science, Humanities and Fine Arts of Belgium.

Address:

Hertogstraat 1 Rue Ducale
Brussels
BELGIUM
ZIP Code: 1000