Here me again, another trip, another conference: GEWEX, TheHague, July 2014.
From this conference, I have a very simple take home message that in my opinion summarizes all the main topics touched during the various sessions. I'm talking about Bjorn Stevens's talk "Cloud, circulation and sensitivity".
In a brilliant way, he showed us how complex the climate problem is and how important it is to focus on a few main questions to understand the global behaviour of the system. Why this? Because it would be nice and democratic to study everything in detail, but... we simply don't have the time.
So... at this point, which are the most important things to study? Well, of course after a huge discussion in the scientific community, 4 main questions stood out.
Here they are:
1. How will storm tack change in the future?
2. What controls the position and strenght of tropical belts?
3. Is convective aggregation or organisation important for climate?
4. How does convection contribute to cloud feedbacks?