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Giorgio.graffino

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About Giorgio Graffino

I'm doing research about climate modelling at the University of Reading (United Kingdom), after getting my Bachelor's Degree in Atmospheric Physics and my Master's Degree in Earth System Physics, in Bologna, and a Ph.D. in Earth System Science, in Trieste . I like science and communication, and I'm collaborating with Minerva since 2021, after being part of the association Sinapsi and joined Pint of Science.

When will global warming end??

2024-03-19T12:11:41+01:0019 March 2024|Categories: Earth and Sky|Tags: , , , , |

There is a question that worries climate scientists a lot: Global warming will stop when we reach zero greenhouse gas emissions? There are two schools of thought on this matter: the "optimistic" one claims that when (and if) we will achieve net zero greenhouse gas emissions (CO2, methane, N2O, CFC, …), the long-term increase in the earth's temperature will stop; l'altra campana è quella “pessimista”, which states that our emissions risk increasing the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere so much as to create a domino effect that is difficult to stop. Le etichette “ottimista” e “pessimista” qui non hanno [...]

The Dawn of the Next Day

2024-03-19T12:15:07+01:0018 January 2024|Categories: Earth and Sky|Tags: , , , , |

Imagine a boundless expanse of ice. Smooth, dazzling, immutable. Succede qualcosa però. Il ghiaccio comincia a rompersi, mettendo a rischio i malcapitati protagonisti che si trovano sulla calotta. Se avete pensato alla scena iniziale de ”L’Era Glaciale”, ci avete quasi azzeccato. Invece di un adorabile scoiattolo preistorico e la sua amata ghianda, in questo caso però il problema è il cambiamento climatico. In “L’Alba del Giorno Dopo” (2004) il protagonista è Jack Hall, uno scienziato esperto di paleo-clima (lo studio del clima passato della Terra). L’ambientazione iniziale è la piattaforma di ghiaccio Larsen C in Antartide, che è effettivamente [...]

Watch out for those two! The return of El Niño

2023-09-22T19:17:34+02:0022 September 2023|Categories: Earth and Sky|Tags: , , , |

The pestiferous child who modulates the earth's climate, together with his little sister. One of the most powerful climatic phenomena that occur on the planet. We are naturally talking about El Niño (the child, in Spanish) and its counterpart La Niña. Se ne parla di nuovo perché l’ufficio meteorologico australiano ha finalmente annunciato che è ufficialmente iniziato un evento del Niño nell'Oceano Pacifico [1], after its American counterpart had already done so a few months ago, che durerà probabilmente fino all'anno prossimo. Let's see together why it is important. The climate has its own cycles of change, that is, not caused by any external forcing. La più [...]

What happens in Antarctica doesn't stay in Antarctica

2023-03-04T20:12:49+01:0013 February 2023|Categories: Earth and Sky|Tags: , , , |

News of huge icebergs detaching from the polar ice shelves is increasingly frequent. The latest in chronological order is that relating to the block of ice detached from the Brunt shelf in Antarctica [1], now called A-81. The event was captured by ESA's Sentinel-2 satellite, which also allowed the experts to monitor all stages of formation and widening of the rift on the platform, until the final detachment of the block. As usual, we indulged ourselves in finding comparisons for the size of the iceberg; we say that the extent of the piece of ice in question is similar to twice the [...]

Who caused climate change?

2022-11-03T18:58:31+01:003 November 2022|Categories: Earth and Sky|Tags: , , , |

The twenty-seventh Conference of the Parties begins on Sunday (COP27) of the United Nations on climate change. This year the conference is held in Sharm El-Sheikh in Egypt. Delegates from every country in the world are called to discuss political and economic solutions to the climate crisis. The science is clear: the cause of recent climate change is greenhouse gas emissions from human activities [1]. The main task of the conference is therefore to review (and possibly strengthen) national commitments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and to find ways to implement them. This is part of the set of measures taken [...]

An extreme summer

2022-10-04T17:42:19+02:004 October 2022|Categories: Earth and Sky|Tags: , , |

Last summer has been difficult on the front of extreme events in the world. Let's start from Italy. After months of drought, in the evening of the 15 September the Marche region was affected by a self-regenerating storm, a very dangerous type of weather system, characterized by its ability to self-feed and stay on the same area for hours. We have already talked about this event in a post [2]. We only add some data that we did not have at the time. The disturbance led to very heavy rainfall, over 400 mm of cumulated rainfall in some areas, according to Protezione Civile [1]. In meteorology, 1 [...]

The Great Green Wall: story of a rebirth

2022-06-10T11:41:57+02:006 June 2022|Categories: Nature|Tags: , , , , |

Recent climate change does not have the same impact anywhere in the world. In fact, there are regions that are most affected by its effects., both from a social and economic point of view. In general, we talk about an increase of heat waves, sea level rise and soil aridity, and an increase in diseases transmissible to humans. All of this could get worse in the future and the scenarios are certainly not positive. If we weren't talking about global warming, you could say it doesn't rain but it pours. The worst effects of climate change are in fact seen in developing countries [...]

The strange shape of the Earth

2022-04-22T11:55:17+02:0022 April 2022|Categories: Earth and Sky|Tags: , , , |

What is the shape of Earth? Sounds like an easy question but it's not at all. The dispute over the shape of the Earth has been going on for millennia, because it is a far from trivial problem. Despite what the flat-earthers say, the hypothesis of the "spherical Earth" was already known in Antiquity: using a very ingenious geometric method, the mathematician Eratosthenes calculated the size of the Earth with amazing accuracy [1], wrong a few hundred kilometers only. A trifle, considering the method. All this in defiance of Christopher Columbus, who several centuries later blatantly misjudged his estimates, tried to reach the Indies by sea and was [...]

Winter Olimpics Games, on the brink of extinction

2022-10-11T17:48:34+02:0010 February 2022|Categories: Earth and Sky|Tags: , , , |

The 2022 Winter Olympic Games are currently ongoing in Beijing. Other than in the China capital city, competitions are also held in the nearby mountainous areas of Yanqing and Zhangjiakou, which are usually too dry to have a good snow cover, needed for running the competitions. The lack of snow is the main concern of the organizers. Artificial snow is one of the potential solutions [1], which is more and more employed all over the world, to make up for the lack of natural snow. That leads to sustainability issues, of course (we'll covered that later), ma [...]

Giorgio Parisi, the essence in the complexity

2022-01-26T13:55:26+01:0026 January 2022|Categories: Curiosity|Tags: , , , |

It's the 5 of October 2021, at the end of incredible year for Italy, for better or for worse. It's not over yet though. That day, in fact, Sweet at the bottom, in Stockholm. Along with climate physicist Hasselmann and Manabe (a first for the field), the Academy gives half of the Nobel Prize 2021 to the Italian physicist Giorgio Parisi [1][2]. The motivation for the assignment is "for the discovery of the interaction between disorder and fluctuations in physical systems from the atomic scale to [...]

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