Climate Change:

Science, Impacts, Mitigation &

Adaptation
Week #1 (04.08.2025, 05.08.2025)

Dr. Shamik Chowdhury

School of Environmental Science & Engineering
Email. [email protected]
Don’t confuse weather and climate
 Weather is the short-term changes in atmospheric variables, such as
temperature and precipitation, in a given area over a period of hours or
days.

 Climate is the statistical description of the weather conditions of a

particular area (including both averages and extremes), over decades to
thousands of years.

 Greenhouse gases (GHGs), occurring naturally in the Earth’s atmosphere,

play a critical role in determining climate; they are transparent to incoming
solar radiation but block the outgoing infrared radiation from Earth’s
surface to escape into space – greenhouse effect.

 Five major gases contribute to the greenhouse effect: carbon dioxide

(CO2), methane (CH4), nitrous oxide (N2O), chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs),
and water vapor (H2O). 01
What is climate change?
 Climate change is the long-term shifts in temperature and weather
patterns.

 These shifts may be natural, such as through variations in the solar cycle,
or anthropogenic, such as CO2 emissions from combustion of fossil fuels
like coal, oil or natural gas, and renewable fuels like biomass.

 As GHG emissions from human activities increase, they build up in the

atmosphere.

 The additional GHGs in the atmosphere enhance the greenhouse effect

and alters the Earth’s climate, leading to shifts in snow and rainfall
patterns, a rise in average temperatures and more extreme climate events,
such as heatwaves and floods.

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What is the greenhouse effect?

(Image courtesy of SBC Energy Institute)

Note:
1 Omitting solar radiation reflected before entering into the atmosphere.
2In reality, the Earth’s energy balance is never in perfect equilibrium because of internal variations:
oceans and atmosphere are actively moving energy around the globe, temporarily storing more or less
energy and changing global mean temperatures.
3Emitted radiation is of similar intensity to incoming radiation (in W/m²), but differs in other respects 03
(mostly invisible infrareds).
What is the greenhouse effect?

(Image courtesy of SBC Energy Institute)

Note:
1 Global warming is the increase in global average surface temperature, measured over a period of at
least 30 years. The atmosphere may warm differently at different altitudes, but it is at the surface
where changes have the most direct impacts on people and ecosystems.
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What is the greenhouse effect?

(Image courtesy of SBC Energy Institute)

Note:
1 Climate change is the significant change in the statistical distribution of weather patterns over a
sustained period, of at least 30 years. 05
Earth’s energy balance at equilibrium
 The Earth’s energy balance is influenced by the intensity of solar radiation
and the properties of its atmosphere, surface, and oceans.

4 3

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(Image courtesy of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)).
Earth’s energy balance at equilibrium
 On the one hand, clouds, aerosols, and the surface partially reflect
incoming solar radiation and contribute to cooling the Earth.

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(Image courtesy of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)).
Earth’s energy balance at equilibrium
 On the other hand, GHGs partially retain the emitted infrared radiation in
the lower atmosphere and contribute to the warming of the Earth’s surface.

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(Image courtesy of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)).
Earth’s climate in the distant past
 Earth's climate has changed throughout history. Just in the last 800,000
years, there have been eight cycles of ice ages and warmer periods, with
the end of the last ice age about 11,700 years ago marking the beginning of
the modern climate era — and of human civilization.

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(Image courtesy of S. Oppenheimer, “Out of Eden – The Peopling of the World”)
Estimating past temperatures
 Past temperature changes are estimated by analysing tiny bubbles of
ancient air trapped in ice cores, drilled out of an ice sheet or glacier.

Ice core extraction in the

Antarctic (Image courtesy of
British Antarctic Survey).

A slice of an ice core showing

trapped air bubbles (Image courtesy 10
of British Antarctic Survey).
Earth’s climate in the recent past
 The upward trend in the globally averaged temperature represents global
warming. The combined land and ocean temperature has increased at an
average rate of 0.08oC per decade since 1880; however, the average rate
of increase since 1981 has been over twice as fast: 0.18°C per decade.

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(Image courtesy of Berkeley Earth)
10 indicators of a warming world

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(Image courtesy of US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA))
Earth’s changing climate
 As a consequence, records indicate an increase in the frequency of
extreme temperature events from 1970 onwards.

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(Image courtesy of IPCC)
Is the sun causing global warming?
 Several lines of evidence indicate that the current global warming cannot
be explained by changes in energy from the sun.

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(Image courtesy of National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA))
Increasing GHGs are warming the planet
 The current global warming trend observed since the mid-20th century is
primarily due to increase in GHGs in the atmosphere.
BREACHED Global annual average temperature (as measured over both

400 ppm land and oceans). Red bars indicate temperatures above and
blue bars indicate temperatures below the average
on 9 May temperature for the period 1901-2000. The black line shows
2013 atmospheric CO2 concentration in parts per million (ppm).
While there is a clear long term global warming trend, each
individual year does not show a temperature increase relative
to the previous year, and some years show greater changes
than others. These year-to-year fluctuations in temperature
are due to natural processes.

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(Image courtesy of NOAA)
The Keeling Curve
 The Keeling Curve, devised by Dr. Charles David Keeling of the Scripps
Institution of Oceanography, represents the concentration of CO2 in the
Earth’s atmosphere since 1958, as recorded at the Mauna Loa
Observatory in Hawaii.

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(Image courtesy of Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego)
Human activities are increasing GHG levels
 Increases in anthropogenic GHG emissions and their atmospheric
concentrations since the Industrial Revolution are well established.

(Image courtesy of SBC Energy Institute)

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Climate forcings
 Climate forcings are the elements responsible for the observed change in
the Earth’s energy budget. A positive forcing causes the Earth to warm,
and a negative forcing causes the Earth to cool.
Global mean energy budget under present-
day climate conditions. Numbers state
magnitudes of the individual energy fluxes
in W m–2, adjusted within their uncertainty
ranges to close the energy budgets.
Numbers in parentheses attached to the
energy fluxes cover the range of values in
line with observational constraints.

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(Image courtesy of IPCC)
Climate forcings
 The main contributors are GHGs, whose warming effects are well known,
being a direct function of their atmospheric concentration.

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(Image courtesy of SBC Energy Institute)
Climate forcings
 Aerosols emitted by human activities have both warming and cooling
effects, and are the most uncertain climate forcings.

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(Image courtesy of SBC Energy Institute)
How do aerosols affect climate?
 Atmospheric aerosols affect climate in many ways.

Overview of interactions between aerosols

and solar radiation and their impact on
climate.

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(Image courtesy of IPCC)
Climate forcings
 Anthropogenic forcing has been increasing since the Industrial Revolution,
and at a faster rate since the 1970s.

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(Image courtesy of SBC Energy Institute)
Climate forcings
 Natural forcings, by contrast, have had much less severe cumulated
impacts on the Earth’s energy budget.

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(Image courtesy of SBC Energy Institute)
Climate forcings
 The oceans’ massive thermal inertia slows down surface warming by
several centuries.
EVOLUTION OF SURFACE WARMING (LAND AND OCEAN COMBINED)
AFTER INSTANTANEOUS DOUBLING OF CO2 CONCENTRATION
IN THE ATMOSPHERE

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(Image courtesy of SBC Energy Institute)
Climate forcings
 Human activities, in particular the cumulated effect of GHGs and aerosol
emissions, are having a much more significant impact on the Earth’s
energy balance today than any natural forcing.

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(Image courtesy of SBC Energy Institute)
Global warming potential
 Global warming potential (GWP) is a measure of how much energy the
emissions of 1 ton of a gas will absorb over a given period of time, relative
to the emissions of 1 ton of CO2.

 CO2, by definition, has a GWP of 1 regardless of the time period used,

because it is the gas being used as the reference.

Major long-lived GHGs and their global warming potential (Carbon Manage., 2010, 1,
191–197).

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Why CO2 emissions matter?
 Earth’s carbon is stored in various reservoirs (atmosphere, oceans, fossil
fuels, etc.), interconnected through the biogeochemical carbon cycle.
Simplified schematic of the global carbon
cycle showing the typical turnover time
scales for carbon transfers through the
major reservoirs (Image courtesy of
IPCC).

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Why CO2 emissions matter?
 Anthropogenic CO2, in particular, has been building up in the atmosphere,
despite being partially stored by ocean and land sinks.
Simplified schematic of the global carbon cycle. Numbers
represent reservoir mass, also called ‘carbon stocks’ in PgC (1
PgC = 1015 gC) and annual carbon exchange fluxes (in PgC yr–1).
Black arrows: Annual carbon fluxes (PgC/year) prior to the
industrial era; Red arrows: Additional anthropogenic carbon fluxes
averaged over the 2000-2009 period; Black numbers: Carbon
reservoirs mass (PgC) prior to the industrial era; Red numbers:
Additional anthropogenic change in carbon stock over the 1750-
2011 period; Red numbers in the reservoirs: Cumulative
changes of anthropogenic carbon over the Industrial Period 1750–
2011 (Image courtesy of IPCC).

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Why CO2 emissions matter?
 The increase in CO2 emissions from fossil fuel burning and those arising
from land use change are the dominant cause of the observed increase in
atmospheric CO2 concentration.

(Image courtesy of SBC Energy Institute)

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