Climate research heats up

‘Warming of the climate system is unequivocal. The atmosphere and ocean have warmed, the amounts of snow and ice have diminished, sea level has risen, and the concentrations of greenhouse gases have increased,’ states the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report. ‘It is extremely likely that human influence has been the dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid-20th century,’ it adds.

Carbon dioxide is the gas that first springs to mind when thinking of the warming of the globe, but other contributing gases include water vapour, methane, nitrous oxide, ozone and halocarbons. All of these are naturally present in the atmosphere, but human behaviour is changing many of their concentrations. Microscopic particles called atmospheric aerosols - both natural, such as dust and sea salt, and manmade, from burning fossil fuels such as sulfates and nitrates - also play an important role. Understanding how these gases and aerosols spread through the atmosphere and how they react over time is crucial to understanding how the Earth’s climate will change in the future.

Nina Notman meets with threes of the atmospheric chemists fitting the pieces of the climate change jigsaw together:

Atmospheric chemist John Pyle who works on computer simulations used to predict global warming patterns and takes measurements of gas concentrations in the atmosphere with the end goal of using these measurements to inform future models,

Lucy Carpenter, who is involved in the long term atmospheric monitoring station in Cape Verde and in measuring short-lived gaseous halocarbons,

and David Stevenson who researches regional differences in carbon dioxide levels.