Climate research is interdisciplinary and seeks to understand the causes and impacts of climate variability and change at global and regional scales. It also considers how climate influences organisms, ecosystems and human societies.
A key societal challenge is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and to adapt to existing and projected changes. Scientists work to improve our understanding of the climate system and how it responds to external influences, such as changing solar radiation or shifting atmospheric conditions. This requires sophisticated mathematical models of the atmosphere, ocean and the ice sheets, built upon established laws of physics and the latest knowledge of physical, chemical and biological processes, and run on powerful computers.
One of the most important tasks for scientists is to estimate how much human influence on the climate system we can expect based on the strength of various feedbacks. Climate models help us do this by comparing the fingerprint of observed climate changes (e.g. temperature changes across Earth, vertically in the atmosphere) to that predicted by a long-term increase in CO2 and other greenhouse gases.
Because climate change impacts every country, but disproportionally affects poorer nations, it is essential to engage scientists from all countries in climate research. But it can be challenging to do so, because data are gappy in space and time, the scientific process is iterative and subject to a number of limitations and scientists must compete with many other academic and policy-related activities for limited funding. In addition, research collaborations are influenced by the nature of funding and other factors, such as geographic location, level of economic development and political climate.