VIII. Earth Earns: An Open CoCreative Earthropocene to Astropocene PediaVerse

2. Global Climate Change as a Complex Dynamical System

Ghil, Michael, et al. A Collection on Climate Dynamics. Proceedings of the Royal Society A. Online March, 2015. A literature survey from journals as this to Physica D where articles such as Bifurcation analysis of delay-induced resonances of the El-Niño Southern Oscillation, Tropical atmospheric circulations with humidity effects, and Parameter estimation for energy balance models with memory can be found.

Climate dynamics is attracting increasing attention from the scientific community because of its intrinsic beauty and complexity, but also because of the socio-economic implications of anthropogenic climate change. Much of this complexity is due to the multiple space and time scales that characterize the processes active in the climate system and the phenomena they give rise to—from raindrops to major hurricanes and on to the oceans' overturning circulation—and to the nonlinearity of the interactions among these processes.

Gupta, Shraddha, et al. Perspectives on the importance of complex systems in understanding our climate and climate change -- The Nobel Prize in Physics 2021. arXiv:2203.03331. Senior climate impact researchers in Germany, the UK, Spain, and Russia, including Jurgen Kurths, provide a comprehensive review of how hyper-active local and global weather can be viewed as an archetypal manifestation of nature’s universal nonlinear dynamic behaviors. Into the 2020s, as these intrinsic forces and patterns become more quantified, a new, crucial phase of understanding and application can accrue.

The Nobel Prize in Physics 2021 was awarded to Syukuro Manabe, Klaus Hasselmann, and Giorgio Parisi for their 'groundbreaking contributions to our understanding of complex systems' including major advances in the understanding of our climate and climate change. In this perspective article, we review their key contributions and discuss their relevance in relation to the present understanding of our climate. We conclude by outlining some promising research directions and open questions in climate science.

Hazeleger, W. and J. Aerts. Digital twins of the Earth with and for humans. Communications Earth & Environment.. vol 5/art 463, 2024. Some thirty ecomputer scientists across Europe such as Utrecht University, MPI Meteorology, Barcelona Supercomputing Center and the University of Valencia describe methods and advances to this approach which constructs a cyber-model of some entity such as a biological organ, brain, medical procedure. In this regard, the subject will be the whole dynamic Earth system, which can then be studied, perturbed and so on.

Digital twins are computerized representations which span scales and domains. Their purpose is to monitor, forecast and assess the Earth system and the consequences of human interventions. Providing users with the capability to interact with and interrogate, this cyberspace method can help identify and address environmental challenges. While existing versions primarily represent the physical world, since the social worlds are interconnected, we argue that humans must be accounted for both within digital twin models. These further inclusions can reach substantial insights into Earth system dynamics and empower people’s action.

Heitzig, Jobst, et al. Editorial. European Physical Journal Special Topics. 225/3, 2016. An introduction to an issue on Health, Energy & Extreme Events in a Changing Climate, whose papers attempt to apply complex network theories to social impacts on disease ecologies, financial markets, and internecine conflicts.

Holme, Petter and Juan Rocha. Networks of Climate Change. arXiv:2105.12537. Tokyo Institute of Technology and Stockholm University post a graphic tutorial for an integrative meld of nature’s independent connectivities with world weather patterns, which then also involve human beings. In the process all manner of thermal, aquatic, population, carbon budgets and much more gain an interrelated aspect. A image is Network Structure of Earth’s Atmospheric Reaction Systems, and a section Tipping Points in Ecological Networks. By another compass, it would appear that the vital biosphere, via human agency, is trying to quantify itself so that our public activities might be appropriately modified. However might we come to see it this way?

Understanding the causes and consequences of global warming, along with mitigations, is a profoundly complex problem. Even when researchers focus in on to publishable investigation, their analysis often contains interacting components which require a network visualization. In addition, networks form a mathematical foundation for a multitude of computational and analytical techniques. In this review, we cover use-cases of networks in the climate-change literature -- what they represent, how they are analyzed, and what insights they bring. We also discuss network data, tools, and problems yet to be explored. (Abstract excerpt)

Jaderberg, Ben, et al. Potential of quantum scientific machine learning applied to weather modelling.. arXiv:2404.08737. Eight theorists at PASQAL, Massy, France, BASF Digital, Ludwigshafen, Germany and BASF Research Park, North Carolina report a first ever mid 2020s combine of quantum phase abilities by way of AI neural net methods to reach a worldwise achievement in climate analyses and forecasts.

In this work we explore how quantum machine learning can advance the science of weather modelling. Using quantum circuits as a device, we consider supervised learning from weather data and physics-informed solving of atmospheric dynamics. In the first case, a quantum model can be trained on global stream function dynamics. We then introduce the barotropic vorticity equation (BVE) as our model of the atmosphere. Using the quantum circuits algorithm, we solve the BVE under boundary conditions and use the trained model to predict unseen future weather states. Whilst challenges remain, our results mark an advancement in terms of the complexity of PDEs solved with quantum scientific machine learning. (Excerpt)

PASQAL is a leading Quantum Computing company in France that builds quantum processors from ordered neutral atoms in 2D and 3D arrays to bring a practical quantum advantage. PASQAL was founded in 2019, out of the Institut d'Optique, by Georges-Olivier Reymond, Christophe Jurczak, Alain Aspect, Nobel Physics, 2022, Antoine Browaeys, and Thierry Lahaye.

Jeevanjee, Nadir, et al. A Holistic View of Climate Sensitivity. Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences. February, 2025. NOAA/Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, Princeton system climatologists including John Krasting add more nested layers that need be noted and factored in if we are to gain integral understanding and foresight of our wild weather

The notion of climate sensitivity has become synonymous with equilibrium climate sensitivity (ECS), as the Earth system responds to a doubling of CO2. But there are scales of this feature arranged by an increasing complexity and societal relevance. This article describes these conditions and by way of climate forcing and feedback, ocean heat uptake, and the airborne fraction of cumulative emissions. (Abstract)

Kuna, Tobias and Sandro Valenti. Special Issue on Mathematics for the Fluid Earth. Journal of Physics A. 50/170301, 2015. An introduction by Reading University and Aix-Marseille University physicists. Some papers are Extreme Value Laws for Fractal Intensity Functions in Dynamical Systems, The Role of Nonlinear Self-Interaction in the Dynamics of Planetary-Scale Atmospheric Fluctuations, and Extreme Event Statistics of Daily Rainfall.

The fluid Earth is an excellent example of a forced, dissipative non-equilibrium system dominated by nonlinear processes and featuring multi-scale interactions. This collection consists of reviews and original research articles which span the full spectrum from mathematical papers addressing general questions, articles considering these questions for more realistic problems in theoretical physics and articles that apply new mathematical tools to concrete physical situations with application to the Fluid Earth system. The complexity of this system and its phenomena are presented in relation to the statistical manifestation of large scale systems in the asymptotic regimes far from equilibrium; where loss of memory and recurrence prevail.

Kurths, Jurgen, et al. Physics for the environment and sustainable development. arXiv:2504.04948. Six Helmholtz Centre Potsdam–German Research Centre for Geosciences post their chapter in the EPS Grand Challenges - Physics for Society in the Horizon 2050 volume (C. Hidalgo, ed., IOP Publishing) which describes how complexity science principles can provide deeper insights into hyperactive global phenomena.

A reliable understanding of the Earth system is essential for the life quality of modern society. In this chapter, we discuss key concepts from nonlinear physics and show how they can enable us to treat problems which cannot be solved by classic methods. In particular, the concepts of multi-scaling, recurrence, synchronization, and complex networks contribute to integral understandings of the dynamics of earthquakes, landslides, (palaeo-)climate and extreme events.

Lana, Xavier, et al. Multifractal Structure of the Monthly Rainfall Regime in Catalonia: Evaluation of the Non-linear Complexity. Chaos. July, 2020. The rain in Spain stays mainly in the plain was famously sung in My Fair Lady (1956). In 2020 Polytechnic University of Catalonia physicists proceed to quantify predictable patterns by way of advanced topological and computational methods.

The complex non-linear regime of the monthly rainfall in Catalonia is analyzed by means of the reconstruction fractal theorem and the multifractal detrended fluctuation analysis algorithm. Areas with a notable degree of complex physical mechanisms are detected by using the concepts of persistence (Hurst exponent), complexity (embedding dimension), predictive uncertainty (Lyapunov exponents), loss of memory of the mechanism (Kolmogorov), and the set of multifractal parameters (spectral asymmetry, width, and complexity). Besides these analyses permitting a detailed description of monthly rainfall pattern characteristics, the obtained results should also be relevant for new research studies concerning monthly amounts forecasting at a monthly scale. (Abstract excerpt)

Lenton, Timothy, et al. Climate Tipping Points are Too Risky to Bet Against. Nature. 575/592, 2019. Seven senior climate scientists including Will Steffen and Hans Schellnhuber seek to inform and warn that near and far world weather, as a hyper-complex, quite over-stressed dynamical system, is capable of a sudden, abrupt change of (attractor) state. But then Hollywood has long picked up on this peril with biosphere busters such as The Day After Tomorrow, Geostorm, Category Seven, Twister, and more.

Lenton, Timothy, et al. Tipping Elements in the Earth’s Climate System. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 105/1786, 2008. A summary of a meeting at the British Embassy, Berlin, facilitated by Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, a German environmentalist and advisor to Chancellor Andrea Merkel, which contends that many biospheric realms such as West African monsoons, Arctic ozone, permafrost depth and expanse, are critically poised and any one could suddenly set off a dramatic shift in global weather conditions.

Human activities may have the potential to push components of the Earth system past critical states into qualitatively different modes of operation, implying large-scale impacts on human and ecological systems. Examples that have received recent attention include the potential collapse of the Atlantic thermohaline circulation, dieback of the Amazon rainforest, and decay of the Greenland ice sheet. Such phenomena have been described as "tipping points" following the popular notion that, at a particular moment in time, a small change can have large, long-term consequences for a system, i.e., "little things can make a big difference.” (1786)

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