Search

The article reports on the climate impacts of anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions. In its Fourth Assessment Report, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) suggests that about 50 percent of a carbon dioxide increase will be removed from the atmosphere within 30 years. It is reported that the logarithmic relationship between carbon dioxide and its radiative forcing implies that the time scale at which atmospheric temperature declines will be longer.

As the global research enterprise grapples with the challenge of a low-carbon future, a key challenge is the future of international conferences. An emerging initiative that combines elements of the traditional in-person conference and a virtual conference is a multi-hub approach. Here we report on a real-world trial of a multi-hub approach, the World Climate Research Programme/Stratosphere-Troposphere Processes and their Role in Climate (WCRP/SPARC) General Assembly held in Qingdao-Reading-Boulder during the last week of October 2022 with more than 400 participants. While there are other examples of conferences run in dual-hub or hybrid online and in-person formats, we are not aware of other large atmospheric science conferences held in this format. Based on travel surveys of participants, we estimate that the multi-hub approach reduced the carbon footprint from travel by between a factor of 2.3 and 4.1 times the footprint when hosting the conference in a single location. This resulted in a saving of at least 288 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (tCO2eq) and perhaps as much as 683 tCO2eq, compared to having the conference in one location only. Feedback from participants, collected immediately after the conference, showed that the majority would again attend another conference in a similar format. There are many ways that the format of the SPARC General Assembly could have been improved, but this proof of concept provides an inspiration to other groups to give the multi-hub format a try. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents abstracts on studies related to global climate change which include the structure and evolution of the 1918/1919 El Niño, the local minimum of tropical cyclogenesis over the eastern Caribbean Sea, and the investigation of the carbon dioxide exchange between ecosystems and the atmosphere.