Special Seminar: Physicist view on the Climate Change

Climate Change is, arguably, the greatest challenge facing the human civilisation today. Global warming is a prominent feature, though not the only one, of climate change, which threatens life as we know it today. Internationally, there is a lot of scientific activity aimed at understanding various features of climate change, with the objective of devising workable strategies for alleviation and/or mitigation of its ravages. Most of these studies, however, are empirical in nature. The basic scientific processes, chemical and physical, remain largely unexplored. Till date, only one Nobel Prize has ever been awarded, to Paul Crutzen, Mario Molina and F. Sherwood Rowland in Chemistry (1995), for their work on ozone formation and decomposition in the atmosphere. The realisation that a complete understanding of the issues related to global change requires a better understanding of fundamental processes has dawned only lately. In this semi-technical (almost non-technical) talk, some of the physics issues related to climate change will be highlighted and current approaches to address them will be discussed.