Prof. Dr. Bernhard Mayer | Why "anthropogenic climate change" is not an opinion and where uncertainties actually lie

Personal details

Bernhard Mayer holds the chair of experimental meteorology at LMU München and leads the remote sensing and radiative transfer research group. In his research, he studies radiative transfer through the Earth's atmosphere experimentally and with complex models. One research focus is to investigate the role of clouds.

About the presentation

How do we actually know that the earth's temperature is increasing and that anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions are responsible for it? No complex climate model is needed to answer this question. Elementary physics taught in school is sufficient. The foundations were laid by none other than Fourier, Kirchhoff and Boltzmann. A temperature increase of 5K as a result of a doubling of CO2 was already predicted by Arrhenius in 1896 and supplemented by the end of the 1980s by the specification of an uncertainty range of about 2 to 5K. That temperature is increasing is undoubtedly clear. But why has the uncertainty not been reduced despite increasingly detailed computer models and exponentially increasing computing power? The answer is to be found in the clouds that literally fall through the models' grids, as Der Spiegel headlined in 2009. With gigantic computer experiments and internationally coordinated measurement campaigns, we are trying to reduce this largest of all uncertainties to enable more precise predictions.