CLIMATE LECTURE 5: The Role of Clouds in Climate

Introduction

David Rind has played a central role in the science of the modeling of climate change. He was the scientific driving force behind the development and evaluation of the first Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) global climate model (GCM), ‘Model II’ (Hansen et al., 1983). Model II was one of the three original GCMs whose projections of climate change in response to a doubling of CO₂ concentration were the basis for the influential Charney Report that produced the first assessment of global climate sensitivity. David used Model II to pioneer the scientific field of climate dynamics, performing a broad range of investigations of processes controlling individual elements of the general circulation and how they changed over a wide range of past and potential future climates (e.g., Rind and Rossow, 1984; Rind, 1986, 1987). The defining characteristic of David’s papers is his unique talent for tracking down the myriad links and causal chains among different parts of the nonlinear climate system. Rather than viewing climate using a simple forcing-and-response paradigm, David showed that the global energy, water, and even momentum cycles are coupled via the general circulation and its transports…