28 April 2014
Guest lecture on Bifurcations and Tipping Points in the Climate System
There is increasing awareness, both within the research community and in broader circles, that the climate system is highly nonlinear and can, therefore, behave in somewhat unexpected ways. In particular, rapid transitions have occurred in the past and might occur in the near future. It has become popular to associate such transitions with the fairly fuzzy concept of “tipping points.”
Participants of the seminar examined one mathematically well understood phenomenon that falls within this fuzzy category, namely bifurcations, and gave a number of simple instances of this phenomenon affecting the climate system.
Some other sources of rapid transitions in the climate system, in which randomness intervenes along with nonlinearity were discussed at the seminar.
