International Summer School on

Climate change and the Water Cycle

1 - 8 June 2008

The  United World College of the Adriatic in collaboration with The Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP), and with funding provided through, the CEC project "WATCH", are organizing the International Summer School on Climate Change and the Water Cycle, to be held from 1 to 8 June 2007 in Duino, Italy.

 
Signs of a warming climate are ubiquitous and unequivocal. Global mean surface temperatures have increased by ¾ of a degree Celsius over the last century and they are rising twice as fast today than they were 50 years ago. Mountain glaciers have, on a global average, retreated. The average sea level has risen 2mm a year for the past half century. In the Arctic the rate of warming is twice that of the global average while the Arctic summer ice sheet is contracting by just under 10% every decade.

This warming is associated with changes in the climate system. Significant changes in precipitation patterns have been detected over the last century. More intense and longer droughts have been observed over wider areas since the 1970s. widespread changes in extreme temperatures have been observed over the last half of a century. Among the key findings of the fourth IPCC assessment report is that these changes are very likely due to anthropogenic green house gas emissions over the last century.

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