Australian Institute of Physics
South Australian Branch
Free Public Lecture
at 7:30 pm, Tuesday September 30th 1997
in the
FLENTJE Lecture Theatre
,
Plaza Building, The University of Adelaide
(go down the steps at the NorthEast corner of Hughes Plaza,
or enter from the Horace Lamb building)
"Detecting a Human Influence on Global Climate"
by Professor David Karoly
CRC for Southern Hemisphere Meteorology
Monash University, Clayton VIC 3168
The recent intergovernmental assessment of climate change
concluded that "climate has changed over the past century" and that
"the balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on
climate". A brief review will be presented of some of this evidence
and the methods which have been used to detect significant changes
in climate and to attribute these changes to human influences.
Major human influences on global climate are due not only to
increasing greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, but also to
increasing amounts of tropospheric aerosols and to decreasing
concentrations of ozone in the stratosphere. Climate model
simulations forced by changes in these three factors show good
agreement with observed changes in the thermal structure of the
atmosphere over the last three decades. This agreement is unlikely
to have occurred by chance through natural climate variability.
Biography
Prof David J Karoly
BSc Hons (Maths), Monash 1976
PhD (Meteorology), Reading, 1980
Professor Karoly is Director of the Cooperative Research Centre for
Southern Hemisphere Meteorology and a Professorial Fellow at Monash
University, in Melbourne, Australia. He is active in research into
the dynamics of the large scale circulation of the atmosphere and
its variability on time scales from days to decades. Specific
research interests include greenhouse climate change, stratospheric
ozone depletion and interannual climate variations due to the El
Nino-Southern Oscillation. He is a member of a number of national
and international committees, including the Scientific Steering
Group of the WCRP project "Stratospheric Processes and their Role
in Climate" (SPARC), and the Australian Academy of Science's
National Committee for Climate and Global Change. He was a
contributor to the recent scientific assessment of climate change
prepared by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. In 1993,
Professor Karoly received the Meisinger Award from the American
Meteorological Society, with citation "for contributions to the
understanding of the role of Rossby wave propagation in atmospheric
teleconnections and to greenhouse climate change research".
The Meteorology CRC was established in 1993 and is a joint venture
between Monash University, the Bureau of Meteorology, CSIRO
Divisions of Atmospheric Research and of Telecommunications and
Industrial Physics, and Silicon Graphics Pty. Ltd. The CRC is based
at Monash University on the Clayton campus, with a budget of more
than $4M per annum in cash and in-kind contributions. It has three
research programs, in Stratospheric Ozone, in Global Transport
Modelling and in Southern Hemisphere Climate Dynamics, together
with an Education program and a Technology Transfer and
Communication program.