Climate is the long-term weather pattern in a region, typically averaged over 30 years. More rigorously, it is the mean and variability of meteorological variables over a time spanning from months to millions of years. Some of the meteorological variables that are commonly measured are temperature, humidity, atmospheric pressure, wind, and precipitation. In a broader sense, climate is the state of the components of the climate system, including the atmosphere, hydrosphere, cryosphere, lithosphere and biosphere and the interactions between them. The climate of a location is affected by its latitude, longitude, terrain, altitude, land use and nearby water bodies and their currents.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is an intergovernmental body of the United Nations. Its job is to advance scientific knowledge about climate change caused by human activities. The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) set up the IPCC in 1988. The United Nations endorsed the creation of the IPCC later that year. It has a secretariat in Geneva, Switzerland, hosted by the WMO. It has 195 member states who govern the IPCC. The member states elect a bureau of scientists to serve through an assessment cycle. A cycle is usually six to seven years. The bureau selects experts in their fields to prepare IPCC reports. There is a formal nomination process by governments and observer organizations to find these experts. The IPCC has three working groups and a task force, which carry out its scientific work.
The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) is a specialized agency of the United Nations responsible for promoting international cooperation on atmospheric science, climatology, hydrology and geophysics.
Sir Robert Tony Watson CMG FRS is a British chemist who has worked on atmospheric science issues including ozone depletion, global warming and paleoclimatology since the 1980s. Most recently, he is lead author of the February 2021 U.N. report Making Peace with Nature.
Extreme weather includes unexpected, unusual, severe, or unseasonal weather; weather at the extremes of the historical distribution—the range that has been seen in the past. Extreme events are based on a location's recorded weather history. They are defined as lying in the most unusual ten percent. The main types of extreme weather include heat waves, cold waves and heavy precipitation or storm events, such as tropical cyclones. The effects of extreme weather events are economic costs, loss of human lives, droughts, floods, landslides. Severe weather is a particular type of extreme weather which poses risks to life and property.
A heat wave, sometimes described as extreme heat, is a period of abnormally hot weather. Definitions vary but are similar. A heat wave is usually measured relative to the usual climate in the area and to normal temperatures for the season. Temperatures that humans from a hotter climate consider normal, can be regarded as a heat wave in a cooler area. This would be the case if the warm temperatures are outside the normal climate pattern for that area. High humidity often occurs during heat waves as well. This is especially the case in oceanic climate countries. Heat waves have become more frequent, and more intense over land, across almost every area on Earth since the 1950s. Heat waves occur from climate change.
The World Climate Research Programme (WCRP) is an international programme that helps to coordinate global climate research. The WCRP was established in 1980, under the joint sponsorship of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the International Council for Science (ICSU), and has also been sponsored by the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission (IOC) of UNESCO since 1993.
John William Zillman AO is an Australian meteorologist, and former President of the World Meteorological Organization and the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering (ATSE). He was born and was educated in Brisbane, Queensland. Through his leadership in professional organizations and advisory groups, Zillman has contributed to shaping science and innovation policy in Australia. More widely, he has contributed to raising awareness to the consequences of global climate change through involvement in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Also Related to Abigail Zillman From Dalby
Sir John Theodore Houghton was a Welsh atmospheric physicist who was the co-chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC) scientific assessment working group which shared the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007 with Al Gore. He was lead editor of the first three IPCC reports. He was professor in atmospheric physics at the University of Oxford, former Director General at the Met Office and founder of the Hadley Centre.
John Alexander Church is an expert on sea level and its changes. He was co-convening lead author for the chapter on Sea Level in the IPCC Third Assessment Report. He was also a co-convening lead author for the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report. He is a member of the Joint Scientific Committee of the WCRP. He was a project leader at CSIRO, until 2016. He is currently a professor with the University of New South Wales' Climate Change Research Centre.
Ann Henderson-Sellers is an Emeritus Professor of the Department of Environment and Geography at Macquarie University, Sydney. She was the Director of the Joint Planning Staff (JPS) of the World Climate Research Programme in 2006 and 2007 and was the Director of the Environment Division at ANSTO from 1998 to 2005. She was the Deputy Vice-Chancellor of The Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology from 1996–1998. Prior to this she was the founding director of the Climatic Impacts Centre at Macquarie University where she continues to hold a Professorship in Physical Geography.
Michael James Salinger is a New Zealand climate change researcher and teacher who has worked for a range of universities in his home country and around the world. He was a senior climate scientist for a Crown Research Institute, the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA), and President of the Commission for Agricultural Meteorology of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). He has received several awards and other honours for his work with climate change and is involved in researching and monitoring past and current climate trends. Within his area of specialist scientific knowledge, Salinger has co-authored and edited a range of reports, articles and books. He was involved in an employment dispute and elements of his theory and practice were at the centre of a case against NIWA.
Julie Michelle Arblaster is an Australian scientist. She is a Professor in the School of Earth, Atmosphere and Environment at Monash University. She was a contributing author on reports for which the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was a co-recipient of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize. Arblaster was a lead author on Chapter 12 of the IPCC Working Group I contribution to the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report in 2013. She has received the 2014 Anton Hales Medal for research in earth sciences from the Australian Academy of Science, and the 2017 Priestley Medal from the Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society. She has been ranked as one of the Top Influential Earth Scientists of 2010-2020, based on citations and discussion of her work.
The contributions of women in climate change have received increasing attention in the early 21st century. Feedback from women and the issues faced by women have been described as "imperative" by the United Nations and "critical" by the Population Reference Bureau. A report by the World Health Organization concluded that incorporating gender-based analysis would "provide more effective climate change mitigation and adaptation."
A marine heatwave is a period of abnormally high seawater temperatures compared to the typical temperatures in the past for a particular season and region. Marine heatwaves are caused by a variety of drivers. These include shorter term weather events such as fronts, intraseasonal events, annual, and decadal (10-year) modes like El Niño events, and human-caused climate change. Marine heatwaves affect ecosystems in the oceans. For example, marine heatwaves can lead to severe biodiversity changes such as coral bleaching, sea star wasting disease, harmful algal blooms, and mass mortality of benthic communities. Unlike heatwaves on land, marine heatwaves can extend over vast areas, persist for weeks to months or even years, and occur at subsurface levels.
Carolina Susana Vera is an Argentine meteorologist. She is the principal investigator of the Argentine research council National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET), and a professor at the Faculty of Exact and Natural Sciences at the University of Buenos Aires (UBA). Her research focuses on climate variability and global warming in South America.
Opha Pauline Dube is a Botswanan environmental scientist and Associate Professor in the Department of Environmental Science at the University of Botswana. She co-authored the IPCC's Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5 °C. She is one of fifteen scientists creating the 2023 Global Sustainable Development Report for the United Nations.
Sarah Perkins-Kirkpatrick is an Australian climate scientist and expert in heatwave research. She was awarded a NSW Young Tall Poppy in 2013 and received the Dorothy Hill award in 2021. She has extensive science communication experience.
Tracy Ainsworth is a marine biologist and Scientia Professor at the University of New South Wales, working on coral reefs, and the biology of the Great Barrier Reef. Her research covers the biology of stresses, cells, disease, immunity and symbiosis. She was awarded the Dorothy Hill Medal for science, from the Australian Academy of Science, for research on coral reef, stresses and impacts of temperature on coral health.
Andréa Sardinha Taschetto or A. S. Taschetto; Andréa Taschetto is a climate change scientist at the University of New South Wales, and winner of the Dorothy Hill award. She was awarded an Australian Research Council Future Fellowship in 2016. Her research has contributed to improved understanding of the role of oceans, on climate variability at regional scales, and from seasonal to mulit-decade timescales. This research also has assisted with future climate projections.
