Task 2
Introduction
You have been employed by the UN to create a Climate Advising Program. The purpose is for people to run this code in the future and have it advise them as to how serious the climate change may have been relative to the climate in year 2005. The program will make use of how the global average surface temperature (and other influences if needed) has changed between when the program is run (in the future) and this reference year, 2005.
Climate Advising Program (your task)
Your program should determine from the rate of temperature change and then determine if there has been definite climate change (warming or cooling), moderate change, or no change. Your program should advise for these three cases: a) if the rate of temperature change is large, then your program should advise that global warming (or cooling) is occurring; b) if the rate of temperature change is moderate, then advise that there is moderate-to-little change; and c) if there is no change, then advise to that effect. For the case in which the rate of temperature change is moderate, it would be helpful if you could advise, based on some other parameters, whether you think global warming or cooling is about to take place. Two parameters that can be used to assess this are the radiative forcings of carbon dioxide (CO2) and sulphate. Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas and so it acts to warm the surface; whereas, sulphate aerosols act to reflect the light coming from the Sun and so cool the surface.
Note: the intended purpose is for the program to be run in the future by UN representatives, so we will call this future time the current time since it is when the program is used and the year 2005 will be called the reference year.
The representatives will enter the Earth's current temperature, the current year (a future value like 2012), and the current radiative forcings of carbon dioxide and sulphate aerosols. You will have to specify various values for these input parameters. You should try a wide range of temperature values, above and below 15 degrees Celsius and you should try sulphate and carbon dioxide forcings above 4 and below 1. You should have the representatives enter these values into a file that will be read in by your program. Your program (when run) will read in the input values and print out advising statements about the present climate into an output file. You will need to use "if statements" in order to process the input data and print the desired conclusions. Refer to your notes regarding the implementation of "if statements".
I will now provide the details of how you can determine if the climate has changed significantly or not. The rate of change of temperature is evaluated by the following equation
RCT=(CT-RT)/NY,
where RCT is the rate of change of temperature (you need to calculate this in your program), CT is the current temperature at a future time, 2012 for example (you can enter various values when you run your program), RT is the reference temperature which is just today's global temperature, 2005 (use a value of 15 degrees Celsius), and NY is the number of years between the current and reference years (your program will need to determine this from the years that are input).
You can use the following statements to evaluate if the climate change is definitely occurring, moderately occurring, or not occurring. Keep in mind that if the rate of temperature change, RCT, is positive it implies a warming and if it is negative it implies a cooling. You can design your use of "if statements" by using the following information:
RCT > 0.1 (degrees/year) - implies global warming has definitely occurred.
RCT < -0.1 (degrees/year) - implies that global cooling has definitely occurred.
RCT = 0.0 (degrees/year) - no change in the climate
0.1 RCT -0.1 (but not RCT=0.0)- is moderate-to-little change has occurred.
As mentioned, for the moderately changed situation, you have to evaluate the sulphate and carbon dioxide forcings to advise if you think change is about to occur. If the carbon dioxide forcing is greater than a critical value, CRTCO2, then global warming is likely to occur as long as sulphates are not above a critical value, CRTSUL. If the sulphate forcing is above the critical value CRTSUL, then global cooling is likely to occur as long as carbon dioxide is not above its critical value, CRTCO2. If both carbon dioxide and sulphate are above their respective critical values, then your results should claim that you are unable to draw a conclusion as to if global cooling, warming, or no change is about to occur. On the other hand, if neither value exceeds their critical value, then you may claim that global change is not imminent.
You can use the following critical values for radiative forcing by sulphates and carbon dioxide: CRTSUL = 1.5 (units of W/m), CRTCO2 = 3.0 (units of W/m).