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Large, abrupt, and widespread climate changes with major impacts have occurred repeatedly in the past, when the Earth system was forced across thresholds. Although abrupt climate changes can occur for many reasons, it is conceivable that human forcing of climate change is increasing the probability of large, abrupt events. Were such an event to recur, the economic and ecological impacts could be large and potentially serious. Unpredictability exhibited near climate thresholds in simple models shows that some uncertainty will always be associated with projections. In light of these uncertainties, policy-makers should consider expanding research into abrupt climate change, improving monitoring systems, and taking actions designed to enhance the adaptability and resilience of ecosystems and economies.

The dynamics of quasi-geostrophic flow with uniform potential vorticity reduces to the evolution of buoyancy, or potential temperature, on horizontal boundaries. There is a formal resemblance to two-dimensional flow, with surface temperature playing the role of vorticity, but a different relationship between the flow and the advected scalar creates several distinctive features. A series of examples are described which highlight some of these features: the evolution of an elliptical vortex; the start-up vortex shed by flow over a mountain; the instability of temperature filaments; the ‘edge wave’ critical layer; and mixing in an overturning edge wave. Characteristics of the direct cascade of the tracer variance to small scales in homogeneous turbulence, as well as the inverse energy cascade, are also described. In addition to its geophysical relevance, the ubiquitous generation of secondary instabilities and the possibility of finite-time collapse make this system a potentially important, numerically tractable, testbed for turbulence theories.

Geomorphic evidence that Mars was warm enough to support flowing water about 3.8 billion years ago presents a continuing enigma that cannot be explained by conventional greenhouse warming mechanisms. Model calculations show that the surface of early Mars could have been warmed through a scattering variant of the greenhouse effect, resulting from the ability of the carbon dioxide ice clouds to reflect the outgoing thermal radiation back to the surface. This process could also explain how Earth avoided an early irreversible glaciation and could extend the size of the habitable zone on extrasolar planets around stars.

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The two- and three-dimensional stability properties of the family of coherent shear-layer vortices discovered by Stuart are investigated. The stability problem is formulated as a non-separable eigenvalue problem in two independent variables, and solved numerically using spectral methods. It is found that there are two main classes of instabilities. The first class is subharmonic, and corresponds to pairing or localized pairing of vortex tubes; the pairing instability is most unstable in the two-dimensional limit, in which the perturbation has no spanwise variations. The second class repeats in the streamwise direction with the same periodicity as the basic flow. This mode is most unstable for spanwise wavelengths approximately 2/3 of the space between vortex centres, and can lead to the generation of streamwise vorticity and coherent ridges of upwelling. Comparison is made between the calculated instabilities and the observed pairing, helical pairing, and streak transitions. The theoretical and experimental results are found to be in reasonable agreement.

Abstract--We have re-examined the inertial range behavior of a passive scalar which is advected by a large-scale velocity field causing a cascade of tracer variance to small scales, where it is dissipated by diffusion. This has been done within the context of an idealized model based on mixing by a 2D area-preserving map alternating with a weak diffusion step; the model is a special case of the general advection-diffusion problem. Both freely decaying and forced equilibrium systems were considered. Our main interest in this concerns the validity of Batchelor's theory predicting a k -I tracer variance spectrum, but the tracer microstructure has been diagnosed in terms of concentration probability distribution functions, generalized dimensions of the dissipation field, structure functions, and cancellation exponents. 2D simulations carried out at 10242 resolution show that i;, the decaying case the evolution settles into a 'fractal eigenmode' in which the variance decays exponentially with time at a rate dependent on the Lyapunov exponent but independent of the diffusion coefficient. Although the concentration pattern is self-similar with time, the power spectrum is not algebraic. Concentration PDFs have exponential tails. The dissipation field is not multifractal, and formally has Dq = 2 for all q. The convergence of the squared-gradient PDFs under coarse-graining indicates some underlying fractal behavior, however, and we have introduced the notion of 'fractal degree of freedom' systems to describe such entities. Cancellation exponents and structure functions were also considered, and have a self-similarity which is compatible with a non-intermittent behavior of the dissipation field. These matters have also been addressed for the equilibrium case. The main difference is that the power spectrum of concentration variance in equilibrium exhibits a power-law inertial range, though it is steeper than k -1, but not as steep as k -2. Other features are similar to the decaying case. Very high resolution simulations of the undiffused problem indicate that a k -1 spectrum is approached asymptotically, but only at resolutions corresponding to 106 x 106. The passive scalar behavior is compared and contrasted with the behavior of scalar pseudo-vorticity (an 'active scalar') in the family of generalized 2D turbulence models introduced elsewhere in this issue.