full transcript

From the Ted Talk by Gavin Schmidt: The emergent patterns of climate change

Unscramble the Blue Letters


The different scales that give you these kinds of ptaetrns range over an enormous range of mutidgane, roughly 14 orders of magnitude, from the small microscopic partleics that seed cduols to the size of the planet itself, from 10 to the minus six to 10 to the eight, 14 orders of spatial magnitude. In time, from milliseconds to millennia, again around 14 orders of magnitude.

What does that mean? Okay, well if you think about how you can calculate these things, you can take what you can see, okay, I'm going to chop it up into lots of little boexs, and that's the result of physics, right? And if I think about a weather moedl, that spnas about five orders of magnitude, from the palnet to a few kilometers, and the time scale from a few minutes to 10 days, maybe a month. We're interested in more than that. We're interested in the climate. That's years, that's millennia, and we need to go to even smaller scales. The stuff that we can't resolve, the sub-scale processes, we need to approximate in some way. That is a huge challenge. Climate models in the 1990s took an even smlaler chunk of that, only about three oedrrs of magnitude. Climate models in the 2010s, kind of what we're working with now, four orders of magnitude. We have 14 to go, and we're increasing our capability of sailmntuig those at about one extra order of magnitude every decade. One extra order of magnitude in spcae is 10,000 temis more calculations. And we keep adding more things, more questions to these different models.

Open Cloze


The different scales that give you these kinds of ________ range over an enormous range of _________, roughly 14 orders of magnitude, from the small microscopic _________ that seed ______ to the size of the planet itself, from 10 to the minus six to 10 to the eight, 14 orders of spatial magnitude. In time, from milliseconds to millennia, again around 14 orders of magnitude.

What does that mean? Okay, well if you think about how you can calculate these things, you can take what you can see, okay, I'm going to chop it up into lots of little _____, and that's the result of physics, right? And if I think about a weather _____, that _____ about five orders of magnitude, from the ______ to a few kilometers, and the time scale from a few minutes to 10 days, maybe a month. We're interested in more than that. We're interested in the climate. That's years, that's millennia, and we need to go to even smaller scales. The stuff that we can't resolve, the sub-scale processes, we need to approximate in some way. That is a huge challenge. Climate models in the 1990s took an even _______ chunk of that, only about three ______ of magnitude. Climate models in the 2010s, kind of what we're working with now, four orders of magnitude. We have 14 to go, and we're increasing our capability of __________ those at about one extra order of magnitude every decade. One extra order of magnitude in _____ is 10,000 _____ more calculations. And we keep adding more things, more questions to these different models.

Solution


  1. smaller
  2. particles
  3. patterns
  4. space
  5. clouds
  6. magnitude
  7. orders
  8. boxes
  9. times
  10. planet
  11. model
  12. spans
  13. simulating

Original Text


The different scales that give you these kinds of patterns range over an enormous range of magnitude, roughly 14 orders of magnitude, from the small microscopic particles that seed clouds to the size of the planet itself, from 10 to the minus six to 10 to the eight, 14 orders of spatial magnitude. In time, from milliseconds to millennia, again around 14 orders of magnitude.

What does that mean? Okay, well if you think about how you can calculate these things, you can take what you can see, okay, I'm going to chop it up into lots of little boxes, and that's the result of physics, right? And if I think about a weather model, that spans about five orders of magnitude, from the planet to a few kilometers, and the time scale from a few minutes to 10 days, maybe a month. We're interested in more than that. We're interested in the climate. That's years, that's millennia, and we need to go to even smaller scales. The stuff that we can't resolve, the sub-scale processes, we need to approximate in some way. That is a huge challenge. Climate models in the 1990s took an even smaller chunk of that, only about three orders of magnitude. Climate models in the 2010s, kind of what we're working with now, four orders of magnitude. We have 14 to go, and we're increasing our capability of simulating those at about one extra order of magnitude every decade. One extra order of magnitude in space is 10,000 times more calculations. And we keep adding more things, more questions to these different models.

Frequently Occurring Word Combinations


ngrams of length 2

collocation frequency
emergent properties 3
good match 3
huge challenge 2
climate models 2
extra order 2
tropical cyclones 2
ozone hole 2
air pollution 2
carbon dioxide 2


Important Words


  1. adding
  2. approximate
  3. boxes
  4. calculate
  5. calculations
  6. capability
  7. challenge
  8. chop
  9. chunk
  10. climate
  11. clouds
  12. days
  13. decade
  14. enormous
  15. extra
  16. give
  17. huge
  18. increasing
  19. interested
  20. kilometers
  21. kind
  22. kinds
  23. lots
  24. magnitude
  25. microscopic
  26. millennia
  27. milliseconds
  28. minutes
  29. model
  30. models
  31. month
  32. order
  33. orders
  34. particles
  35. patterns
  36. physics
  37. planet
  38. processes
  39. questions
  40. range
  41. resolve
  42. result
  43. roughly
  44. scale
  45. scales
  46. seed
  47. simulating
  48. size
  49. small
  50. smaller
  51. space
  52. spans
  53. spatial
  54. stuff
  55. time
  56. times
  57. weather
  58. working
  59. years