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  • Rights: The University of Waikato
    Published 21 June 2007 Referencing Hub media
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    Dr Mike Williams from NIWA explains what areas you need to be good at if you want to study climates and the Antarctic environment.

    Transcript

    If you want to study -- study icebergs or climate1 or sea ice, it’s bad news if you don’t like maths or physics. The reality is that climate is part of physics, and you need a high level of maths in it. And that’s the background you need if you want to move in that direction.

    The great thing about these areas is that you don’t actually have to spend your life sitting in a lab fiddling around with little bits of equipment. So even if you find that side of physics and maths frustrating, there are still great big problems you can work on, and ways the work that you can do can contribute to society, like working on climate change2 issues and things like that.

    1. climate: The weather conditions of an area averaged over a series of years, usually 30 or more.
    2. climate change: The large-scale, long-term increase in the Earth’s average temperatures, with associated changes in weather patterns. There is significant scientific evidence that warming is due to increased quantities of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, with most of the rise due to human activity.
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      climate

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    2. The weather conditions of an area averaged over a series of years, usually 30 or more.

      climate change

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    4. The large-scale, long-term increase in the Earth’s average temperatures, with associated changes in weather patterns. There is significant scientific evidence that warming is due to increased quantities of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, with most of the rise due to human activity.