A&O SCI 1 Lecture Notes - Lecture 12: 2003 European Heat Wave, 2015 Pakistan Heat Wave, Sindh
8 Nov 2016
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In today"s survey of human impacts of climate change, we"ll touch upon the major categories of impacts and examine a few well understood examples. However, we only really understand a small subset of the potential impacts. These knowledge gaps are even more acute in the developing world, where impacts are likely to be even greater and vulnerability is also greater. Keep in mind that our examples are biased toward what we know, and what we know is biased toward the developed world. Suppose in the current climate we have a distribution of temperatures at a particular location. This distribution represents the chances of a given temperature occurring on a particular day. Temperatures in the center of the distribution are more likely to occur, and temperatures at the hot and cold extremes are not as likely. Focusing on the hot extremes we can imagine a threshold beyond which we consider a day to be extremely hot .
