Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
greenhouse gases, China and the United States, have
refused to join in of
cial control mechanisms. With it,
they may join in the next round of negotiations on inter-
national action.
.
How Is It Done?
All sorts of models are made of what will happen in the
future, based on previous experience and knowledge of
the processes that will affect whatever is being modeled.
People make (or should make) models of income and
savings against payments when buying a car. The Federal
Reserve models economic growth and in
ation when it
decides on interest rates. Both of these are relatively
short-term models that rely on predictions that look only
months or a few years into the future, and they are also
not based on any actual physical laws. They also do not
treat the potential for instability in any reasonable way, as
shown by the global
.
The climate models are attempting to do something
much more ambitious, and do it better. They are trying to
predict what will happen to our climate
financial chaos that began in
or more years
in the future based on models of how the climate system
responds to changes. The models are grounded in the
physical and biological sciences, are mathematically com-
plex, and come from an evolving understanding of the
science. In
Chapter
an introduction to the greenhouse
effect was given that showed how the temperature of our
planet is set by a balance between the energy coming from
the Sun and the heat energy radiated back out into space.
Calculating the temperature at which that balance is
struck in the real world is an enormously complicated
