Recent climate change: from causes to impacts on extreme events and air quality

Climate change related to the recent global warming is a challenge for both science and society. Science has to understand and predict the behaviour of this complex system, under natural and anthropogenic external forcings, and internal variability. Society is strongly affected by the impacts of climate change on territories, ecosystems and humans, and therefore has to mitigate and adapt, but, in the meantime, it must use science for achieving a better knowledge of the characteristic features of these impacts and for understanding their relationships with the climate change itself. In this framework, scope of this work is to briefly review two studies performed in this Institute and related to investigations about the causes of the recent global warming and the behaviour of tornadoes in Italy under sea surface temperature (SST) changes. Furthermore, the consequences of climate change for air quality in Italy are discussed.