Our aim is to help people understand global climate change — and how the factors that drive climate are changing.
We start with climate diagnostics — people are usually most interested in climate change itself. But cause-and-effect analysis requires also data on climate forcings (which drive climate change) and feedbacks (which amplify or diminish climate change).
We update graphs of “Storms of My Grandchildren.” Yet the greatest insight about processes discussed in “Storms” is often provided by other quantities, for example, the rate of ice sheet disintegration. We include some data from other scientists or their web sites, as indicated.
Continual updating of data curves, whether global temperature, the Greenland ice sheet mass, the sun’s brightness, Keeling’s carbon dioxide record, or other more obscure quantities, is a most interesting aspect of science. Sometimes data curves follow an expected path, sometimes not, but we usually learn something. As Richard Feynman said, there is a pleasure of finding things out.
See on www.columbia.edu
