Abstract: Concern about the weather ranges from local, short-term weather reports to projections of global, centuries-long climate trends. The formal models required to provide these various data differ enormously according to the desired time horizon and geographic scope. Professor Meadows will discuss some theoretical considerations and illustrate different approaches.“Part II. Modeling paradigms” in The Electronic Oracle, Computer Models and Social Decisions, D. Meadows a...

The presentation will first explain what a system is and will then give some basic notions about how to build a model of a system. It will insist on the role of entropy and negentropy in systems, describe the different components of the modeling of an environmental system and show how modeling has contributed to understand climate change. Finally, it will put the modeling of our environmental problems in an evolutionary perspective, address its cognitive foundations and get to the ethical dim...

Central to solving the climate change problem is the design of sophisticated observational means and model systems. The integration of reliable measurements over long periods, at high resolution, including a wide range of variables and on a global scale, is a huge worldwide effort. It is paramount to the assessment of climate change. It is also the key for our deeper understanding, for model validation and for harmonizing the evaluation process from data analysis, to simulations, all the w...

In recent decades, changes in climate have caused tremendous impacts on natural and human systems across the world, with an increase in socio-economic costs from climate-related events. In the future, climate change is also expected to increase the frequency of extreme weather events such as floods, droughts and heat waves, as well as the intensity of hydro-meteorological hazards. The rate of warming will then increase the likelihood of severe and irreversible impacts, especially for the m...