1. Introduction
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is an international organization that was established in 1988 to provide ״policymakers with regular assessments of the scientific basis of climate change, its impacts and future risks, and options for adaptation and mitigation[1]". In the three parts of the report, which include 1) a scientific basis 2) impacts, adaptation, and vulnerability 3) climate change mitigation, several natural and social phenomena are mentioned in different contexts associated with climate change. In order to examine whether the scientific interest in the different natural and social phenomena is related to climate change, we compare the general scientific interest with the interest of the IPCC in the phenomena.
In the course "Scales in the Climate System", we look at the climate system as well as at climate-related phenomena in the social system. The “scales in the climate system” refer to both social and natural phenomena and is the way of measuring and examining a certain phenomenon. In order to measure a phenomenon or its impact, it is first important to understand what is it made of. The different components of a certain phenomenon are agent, attributes, rules, and process. Each one of these components presents the different parts that build a certain phenomenon. The following paper focuses on two scales - IPCC and scientific interest, in order to examine 7 different social and natural phenomena. This examination allows to compare different phenomena and find a trend or an answer to the hypothesis.
The purpose of this paper is to examine whether the scientific interest in climatic phenomena shows a similar trend to the IPCC interest in the selected phenomena. The importance of this examination is the question of whether the scientific interest in climatic phenomena derives from an interest in climate change. My assumption was that the interest of the IPCC would show a similar trend to the general scientific interest in climatic phenomena, in other words, the scientific interest in climatic phenomena is related to climate change. It is important to note that the IPCC interest described above is related to the different aspects of climate change and does not necessarily reflect the general scientific interest. Moreover, it may be that scientific interest and publications on a particular phenomenon do not relate to issues of climate change but to other issues such as climate, weather, biology, history, etc.
The relevance of the research question in the context of the climate system is the understanding of the scientific research interest between 2003 and 2013 and the importance and dominance of climate change in that research. As to the course question "On which scales do climate phenomena occur and affect human experiences and social responses?" it can be seen from the following results that the scales used in this paper, can shed light on the scientific engagement to climate change which is a phenomenon that has a wide impact on society.
2. Definitions
Two scales are used in this paper: IPCC interest and scientific interest. In order to examine the scientific interest of the phenomena, we used "Google scholar" to check the number of articles published between 2003-2013; these are about ten years prior to the publishing of the IPCC report, which is the source of the second scale used in the paper. In addition, in order to obtain more reliable and accurate results, the search is done in articles that are written in English and include in their titles the names of the examined phenomena.
The second scale used is the IPCC interest. In order to find the interest of the IPCC on the phenomena, we used the last report of the IPCC which consists of three parts (they can be listed). In each part, we checked the number of times the phenomenon is mentioned by using Cntl + F searching.
the table \ref{table}. is showing the keywords used and the number of articles found on "Google scholar" and the times that the phenomenon is mentioned in different parts of the IPCC report:
The phenomena were selected from the course's database(reference), but there were several changes in the phenomena. First, "City adaptation" was replaced by "Urban Adaptation" because this is the accepted term in IPCC report and the scientific scholars. Second, an Indian monsoon was replaced by a monsoon, meaning that it includes not only the Indian monsoon but also other kinds of monsoon. It is done in order to obtain more accurate results because the term monsoon is used sometimes for Indian monsoon and sometimes for another monsoon.
As shown in the table, after the normalization, the same trend can be seen in both scales. In both scales, the order of the interest of the phenomena from high to low is similar for both sciences and IPCC interest. The high-to-low rating is the same except for the two last phenomena, "urban adaptation", and "MJO". However, in the last two phenomena, the difference is very small and is within the range of error that can result from the limitations described below. This trend is particularly surprising because, apart from El Nino which was eventually not included in the results, these were the only examined phenomena.
3. Scale Diagram
In order to examine the relationship between the two scales described above, seven phenomena were examined, six natural phenomena and one social phenomenon. Here it is important to note that the examination of natural phenomena and social phenomena by the same scale can be challenging because sometimes the phenomena have very different characteristics. Nevertheless, the selected scales can certainly examine both types of phenomena because they do not relate to the characteristics of the phenomena, but rather to the interest of the scientific community in these phenomena.
Matlab software which enables analysis of data is used in order to draw the diagram. This is because, at the stage of receiving the data, it was possible to see a certain trend that can be illustrated better by Matlab than by the course diagram generator. The fit done in the diagram shows the connection between the different phenomena. The diagram includes both linear and exponential correlations which reflect the trend that links the scientific and the IPCC interest to the phenomena. As noted, this possibility of drawing a trend is the reason of presenting it this way and not by the diagram generator that was used during the course.