Physics and Mathematics for the Climate Crisis

The climate is a forced, dissipative, nonlinear, heterogeneous, and non-equilibrium system. It exhibits natural variability on many spatial-temporal scales, and it is subject to natural as well as anthropogenic external forcings. The urgency of the climate crisis is demanding fundamental advances in our knowledge of the climate, in order to better understand and anticipate extreme events and critical transitions due to tipping points. Nonequilibrium statistical physics, (stochastic) dynamical systems theory, and associated data-driven methods complement each other in helping understand and predict the climate’s evolution. Such a novel viewpoint permits a unified handling of natural climate variability and forced climate change and allows one to clarify Hasselmann’s revolutionary intuition of using the stochasticity associated with fast weather processes to probe the slow dynamics of the climate system.

Presenters:

• Valerio Lucarini, Univ of. Leicester

• Reyk Börner, Univ of. Reading

• Francesco Ragone, Univ. Louvain

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