On April 20, 2021, Zhou Tianjun, Researcher of the Institute of Atmospheric Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, gave a lecture on "Introduction to climate change science" to our graduate students.
The theme of this course is the detection and attribution of climate change. The course contents are mainly divided into four parts: 1. Why do detection of attribution; 2. Factors affecting climate change; 3. How to do detection of attribution; 4.Attributions of long-term trends; 5.Attribution of extreme weather and climate events. First of all, Researcher Zhou Tianjun interacted with students about whether they had heard of "detection and attribution", and then explained the meaning of detection and attribution by analogy with real-life examples. He explained that the observed climate change includes the change of various time scales, and the detection of climate change is to confirm that the climate has changed significantly in a statistical sense. Attributions to climate change identify, at a certain level of confidence, the most likely cause of the detected climate change. Actual climate change includes three parts: man-made external forcing (mainly including greenhouse gases such as CO2and aerosol radiative forcing, land-use change), natural forcing (such as volcanic aerosol and solar irradiance change), and internal variability (such as ENSO, PDO and AMO).In climate change science, detection and attribution methods are used to determine whether human activities have caused global or regional climate change, which has a strong practical significance.
At the end of the course, Researcher Zhou Tianjun made an important summary on the recent development and future development prospects of the research on climate change detection and attribution in China: China's foundation is relatively weak, but it has developed rapidly in recent years, and the attribution of events is an international frontier scientific problem. As for the questions raised by researcher Zhou Tianjun in class, the students thought actively and discussed enthusiastically. At the end of the class, the students thanked him with warm applause.
Zhou Tianjun, doctoral supervisor, researcher of Institute of Atmospheric Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, post professor of Chinese Academy of Sciences, distinguished researcher of Chinese Academy of Sciences, and winner of National Science Fund for Distinguished Young Scholars. He is now deputy director of the Institute of Atmospheric Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences. He mainly engaged in climate dynamics, climate simulation, air-sea interaction and monsoon research. From 2014 to 2019, he was selected into the "Elsevier list of highly cited scholars in China". From 2018 to 2019, he was selected into the list of "highly cited scientists in the world" by the web of science and clarivate analytics. He has won the second prize of the National Natural Science Award (ranking fifth). His doctoral students had won the president's award of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, excellent doctoral dissertations of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and 100 Excellent Doctoral Dissertations in China.
