'Matthews Measure' Proposed New Yardstick For Climate Change

Thursday, September 10, 2009 - 13:22 in Earth & Climate

What is your yardstick for climate change? Really, how do you relate climate response to human CO2 emissions? A new yardstick is proposed by Damon Matthews, a professor in Concordia University’s Department of Geography, Planning and the Environment. With colleagues from Victoria and the U.K., Matthews used a combination of global climate models and historical climate data to derive a simple linear relationship between total cumulative emissions and global temperature change. As complex as the climate change is, a new metric is always possible to better relate to it. What could you come up with if you compared various climate modeling experiments? Some observations were noted, for example, in the global temperature response to increasing atmospheric CO2: read more

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