Sample records for climate
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Climate change and climate policy
International Nuclear Information System (INIS)
Alfsen, Knut H.; Kolshus, Hans H.; Torvanger, Asbjoern
2000-08-01
The climate issue is a great political and scientific challenge for several reasons: (1) There are many uncertain aspects of the climate problem, such as future emission of climate gases, the response of the climate system upon these gases, and the effects of climate changes. (2) It is probable, however, that anthropogenic emission of climate gases, deforestation etc. will cause noticeable climate changes in the future. This might be observed as increased frequency of extreme weather situations. This appears to be a greater threat than a gradual increase of temperature and precipitation. (3) Since the climate system is large and react only relatively slowly on changes in for instance the emission of climate gases, the climate problem can only be solved by means of long-term measures. (4) The climate changes may be irreversible. A rational short-term strategy is to ensure maximum flexibility, which can be done by ''slowing down'' (curtailing emissions) and by avoiding irreversible actions as much as possible. The long-term challenge is to develop an economically responsible alternative to the present fossil-based energy system that permits carbon-efficient technologies to compete on price with coal and unconventional oil and gas. Norway is in a special position by being a large exporter of fossil fuel and at the same time wanting to appear responsible in environmental matters. This combination may incur considerable expenses upon Norway and it is therefore important that environmental commitments like the Kyoto agreement can be honoured to the lowest possible cost. The costs can be minimized by: (1) minimizing the measure costs in Norway, (2) working to make the international quota price as low as possible, and (3) reducing the loss of petroleum income as much as possible. This report describes the earth's climate history, the forces behind climatic changes and what the prospects for the future look like. It also reviews what is being done to curtail the emission of
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Climate variability and climate change
International Nuclear Information System (INIS)
Rind, D.
1990-01-01
Changes of variability with climate change are likely to have a substantial impact on vegetation and society, rivaling the importance of changes in the mean values themselves. A variety of paleoclimate and future climate simulations performed with the GISS global climate model is used to assess how the variabilities of temperature and precipitation are altered as climate warms or cools. In general, as climate warms, temperature variability decreases due to reductions in the latitudinal temperature gradient and precipitation variability increases together with the intensity of the hydrologic cycle. If future climate projections are accurate, the reduction in temperature variability will be minimized by the rapid change in mean temperatures, but the hydrologic variability will be amplified by increased evapotranspiration. Greater hydrologic variability would appear to pose a potentially severe problem for the next century
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Climate variability and climate change
International Nuclear Information System (INIS)
Rind, D.
1991-01-01
Changes of variability with climate change are likely to have a substantial impact on vegetation and society, rivaling the importance of changes in the mean values themselves. A variety of paleoclimate and future climate simulations performed with the GISS global climate model is used to assess how the variabilities of temperature and precipitation are altered as climate warms or cools. In general, as climate warms, temperature variability decreases due to reductions in the latitudinal temperature gradient and precipitation variability increases together with the intensity of the hydrologic cycle. If future climate projections are accurate, the reduction in temperature variability will be minimized by the rapid change in mean temperatures, but the hydrologic variability will be amplified by increased evapotranspiration. Greater hydrologic variability would appear to pose a potentially severe problem for the next century. 19 refs.; 3 figs.; 2 tabs
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Planetary climates (princeton primers in climate)
Ingersoll, Andrew
2013-01-01
This concise, sophisticated introduction to planetary climates explains the global physical and chemical processes that determine climate on any planet or major planetary satellite--from Mercury to Neptune and even large moons such as Saturn's Titan. Although the climates of other worlds are extremely diverse, the chemical and physical processes that shape their dynamics are the same. As this book makes clear, the better we can understand how various planetary climates formed and evolved, the better we can understand Earth's climate history and future.
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Managing Climate Change Refugia for Climate Adaptation
Daly, Christopher; Dobrowski, Solomon Z.; Dulen, Deanna M.; Ebersole, Joseph L.; Jackson, Stephen T.; Lundquist, Jessica D.; Millar, Constance I.; Maher, Sean P.; Monahan, William B.; Nydick, Koren R.; Redmond, Kelly T.; Sawyer, Sarah C.; Stock, Sarah; Beissinger, Steven R.
2016-01-01
Refugia have long been studied from paleontological and biogeographical perspectives to understand how populations persisted during past periods of unfavorable climate. Recently, researchers have applied the idea to contemporary landscapes to identify climate change refugia, here defined as areas relatively buffered from contemporary climate change over time that enable persistence of valued physical, ecological, and socio-cultural resources. We differentiate historical and contemporary views, and characterize physical and ecological processes that create and maintain climate change refugia. We then delineate how refugia can fit into existing decision support frameworks for climate adaptation and describe seven steps for managing them. Finally, we identify challenges and opportunities for operationalizing the concept of climate change refugia. Managing climate change refugia can be an important option for conservation in the face of ongoing climate change. PMID:27509088
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Managing climate change refugia for climate adaptation
Morelli, Toni L.; Jackson, Stephen T.
2016-01-01
Refugia have long been studied from paleontological and biogeographical perspectives to understand how populations persisted during past periods of unfavorable climate. Recently, researchers have applied the idea to contemporary landscapes to identify climate change refugia, here defined as areas relatively buffered from contemporary climate change over time that enable persistence of valued physical, ecological, and socio-cultural resources. We differentiate historical and contemporary views, and characterize physical and ecological processes that create and maintain climate change refugia. We then delineate how refugia can fit into existing decision support frameworks for climate adaptation and describe seven steps for managing them. Finally, we identify challenges and opportunities for operationalizing the concept of climate change refugia. Managing climate change refugia can be an important option for conservation in the face of ongoing climate change.
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Littlefield, Caitlin E; McRae, Brad H; Michalak, Julia L; Lawler, Joshua J; Carroll, Carlos
2017-12-01
Increasing connectivity is an important strategy for facilitating species range shifts and maintaining biodiversity in the face of climate change. To date, however, few researchers have included future climate projections in efforts to prioritize areas for increasing connectivity. We identified key areas likely to facilitate climate-induced species' movement across western North America. Using historical climate data sets and future climate projections, we mapped potential species' movement routes that link current climate conditions to analogous climate conditions in the future (i.e., future climate analogs) with a novel moving-window analysis based on electrical circuit theory. In addition to tracing shifting climates, the approach accounted for landscape permeability and empirically derived species' dispersal capabilities. We compared connectivity maps generated with our climate-change-informed approach with maps of connectivity based solely on the degree of human modification of the landscape. Including future climate projections in connectivity models substantially shifted and constrained priority areas for movement to a smaller proportion of the landscape than when climate projections were not considered. Potential movement, measured as current flow, decreased in all ecoregions when climate projections were included, particularly when dispersal was limited, which made climate analogs inaccessible. Many areas emerged as important for connectivity only when climate change was modeled in 2 time steps rather than in a single time step. Our results illustrate that movement routes needed to track changing climatic conditions may differ from those that connect present-day landscapes. Incorporating future climate projections into connectivity modeling is an important step toward facilitating successful species movement and population persistence in a changing climate. © 2017 Society for Conservation Biology.
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ClimatePad: Enabling public exploration of climate data
Walsh, J. E.; Chapman, W. L.
2012-12-01
Informal learners interested in climate issues can find a wealth of information in the print and online media related to climate and climate change. Throughout these resources, the equal use of generic terms like 'global warming' and 'climate change' suggest a level of nuance in the science that is not easy to convey in this conventional media. Perhaps more than any other discipline, climate literacy has the most potential to be enhanced via the process of cognitive construction and reconstruction, rather than simple transmission of knowledge. Constructionism suggests that meaningful learning happens most effectively if the learner is actively engaged in constructing a product in the real world rather than absorbing information passively. Recent technological innovations have introduced mobile computing devices with sufficient power to do serious data analysis. The potential of these devices to augment climate literacy by turning citizens into scientists has yet to be exploited. We introduce ClimatePad, an iPad application that permits students and public to actively browse climate datasets, construct trends, plot time series, create composite differences and view animations of real-world climate data. Interactions with the ClimatePad permits varying the starting and ending dates of trends and differences. Climate analysis maps and animations can be customized with different color palettes, enticing the user to delve into and absorb the subtleties of the regional and temporal variations of the recent climate record. Finally, user-generated climate visualizations created with ClimatePad can be emailed to friends and shared via Facebook, entraining even more active learners.
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Climate@Home: Crowdsourcing Climate Change Research
Xu, C.; Yang, C.; Li, J.; Sun, M.; Bambacus, M.
2011-12-01
Climate change deeply impacts human wellbeing. Significant amounts of resources have been invested in building super-computers that are capable of running advanced climate models, which help scientists understand climate change mechanisms, and predict its trend. Although climate change influences all human beings, the general public is largely excluded from the research. On the other hand, scientists are eagerly seeking communication mediums for effectively enlightening the public on climate change and its consequences. The Climate@Home project is devoted to connect the two ends with an innovative solution: crowdsourcing climate computing to the general public by harvesting volunteered computing resources from the participants. A distributed web-based computing platform will be built to support climate computing, and the general public can 'plug-in' their personal computers to participate in the research. People contribute the spare computing power of their computers to run a computer model, which is used by scientists to predict climate change. Traditionally, only super-computers could handle such a large computing processing load. By orchestrating massive amounts of personal computers to perform atomized data processing tasks, investments on new super-computers, energy consumed by super-computers, and carbon release from super-computers are reduced. Meanwhile, the platform forms a social network of climate researchers and the general public, which may be leveraged to raise climate awareness among the participants. A portal is to be built as the gateway to the climate@home project. Three types of roles and the corresponding functionalities are designed and supported. The end users include the citizen participants, climate scientists, and project managers. Citizen participants connect their computing resources to the platform by downloading and installing a computing engine on their personal computers. Computer climate models are defined at the server side. Climate
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[Constructing climate. From classical climatology to modern climate research].
Heymann, Matthias
2009-01-01
Both climate researchers and historians of climate science have conceived climate as a stable and well defined category. This article argues that such a conception is flawed. In the course of the 19th and 20th century the very concept of climate changed considerably. Scientists came up with different definitions and concepts of climate, which implied different understandings, interests, and research approaches. Understanding climate shifted from a timeless, spatial concept at the end of the 19th century to a spaceless, temporal concept at the end of the 20th. Climatologists in the 19th and early 20th centuries considered climate as a set of atmospheric characteristics associated with specific places or regions. In this context, while the weather was subject to change, climate remained largely stable. Of particular interest was the impact of climate on human beings and the environment. In modern climate research at the close of the 20th century, the concept of climate lost its temporal stability. Instead, climate change has become a core feature of the understanding of climate and a focus of research interests. Climate has also lost its immediate association with specific geographical places and become global. The interest is now focused on the impact of human beings on climate. The paper attempts to investigate these conceptual shifts and their origins and impacts in order to provide a more comprehensive perspective on the history of climate research.
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The climatic out of control. the climatic forcing
International Nuclear Information System (INIS)
Bony-Lena, S.; Dufresne, J.L.; Acot, P.; Friedlingstein, P.; Berger, A.; Loutre, M.L.; Raynaud, D.; Thuiller, W.; Le Treut, H.; Houssais, M.N.; Duplessy, J.C.; Royer, J.F.; Douville, H.; Barberousse, A.; Quinon, P.
2007-01-01
The expert group on the climate evolution affirms that the global warming is unequivocal and that the human being is the main responsible. This document broaches the climatic change under many aspects: the principle, the historical aspect of the greenhouse effect, the GIEC, the carbon cycle, the paleo-climate theory, the antarctic ices and the impacts of the climatic change on the biodiversity, the simulations and the models, the climatic indicators and the climatic forcing by human activities. (A.L.B.)
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Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)
Melieres, M.A.; Marechal, Ch.
2010-07-01
This teaching book takes stock of the climate change question which has moved beyond the simple scientific framework. Man will play a key role in the changes to come and the choices he is going to make will have a major impact on our environment and on our societies. The aim of this book is to draw out the essential marks from the multiple disciplines involved in the study of climate change in order to get a global overview of the question. Starting from simple mechanisms showing up the driving components of the climate equilibrium (like the greenhouse effect), the authors analyse the climates of the past, and describe the different causes of the actual climate change and its possible evolution in the future. The global nature of the climate warming in progress is demonstrated and some of its actual impacts on the environment are shown up. The importance of the anthropic influence in this change is underlined as well as the stakes of the mastery of our greenhouse gas emissions. (J.S.)
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From climate-smart agriculture to climate-smart landscapes
Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)
Scherr Sara J
2012-08-01
Full Text Available Abstract Background For agricultural systems to achieve climate-smart objectives, including improved food security and rural livelihoods as well as climate change adaptation and mitigation, they often need to be take a landscape approach; they must become ‘climate-smart landscapes’. Climate-smart landscapes operate on the principles of integrated landscape management, while explicitly incorporating adaptation and mitigation into their management objectives. Results An assessment of climate change dynamics related to agriculture suggests that three key features characterize a climate-smart landscape: climate-smart practices at the field and farm scale; diversity of land use across the landscape to provide resilience; and management of land use interactions at landscape scale to achieve social, economic and ecological impacts. To implement climate-smart agricultural landscapes with these features (that is, to successfully promote and sustain them over time, in the context of dynamic economic, social, ecological and climate conditions requires several institutional mechanisms: multi-stakeholder planning, supportive landscape governance and resource tenure, spatially-targeted investment in the landscape that supports climate-smart objectives, and tracking change to determine if social and climate goals are being met at different scales. Examples of climate-smart landscape initiatives in Madagascar’s Highlands, the African Sahel and Australian Wet Tropics illustrate the application of these elements in contrasting contexts. Conclusions To achieve climate-smart landscape initiatives widely and at scale will require strengthened technical capacities, institutions and political support for multi-stakeholder planning, governance, spatial targeting of investments and multi-objective impact monitoring.
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Flanagan, S.; Hurtt, G. C.; Fisk, J. P.; Rourke, O.
2012-12-01
A robust understanding of the sensitivity of the pattern, structure, and dynamics of ecosystems to climate, climate variability, and climate change is needed to predict ecosystem responses to current and projected climate change. We present results of a study designed to first quantify the sensitivity of ecosystems to climate through the use of climate and ecosystem data, and then use the results to test the sensitivity of the climate data in a state-of the art ecosystem model. A database of available ecosystem characteristics such as mean canopy height, above ground biomass, and basal area was constructed from sources like the National Biomass and Carbon Dataset (NBCD). The ecosystem characteristics were then paired by latitude and longitude with the corresponding climate characteristics temperature, precipitation, photosynthetically active radiation (PAR) and dew point that were retrieved from the North American Regional Reanalysis (NARR). The average yearly and seasonal means of the climate data, and their associated maximum and minimum values, over the 1979-2010 time frame provided by NARR were constructed and paired with the ecosystem data. The compiled results provide natural patterns of vegetation structure and distribution with regard to climate data. An advanced ecosystem model, the Ecosystem Demography model (ED), was then modified to allow yearly alterations to its mechanistic climate lookup table and used to predict the sensitivities of ecosystem pattern, structure, and dynamics to climate data. The combined ecosystem structure and climate data results were compared to ED's output to check the validity of the model. After verification, climate change scenarios such as those used in the last IPCC were run and future forest structure changes due to climate sensitivities were identified. The results of this study can be used to both quantify and test key relationships for next generation models. The sensitivity of ecosystem characteristics to climate data
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Climate stories: Why do climate scientists and sceptical voices participate in the climate debate?
Sharman, Amelia; Howarth, Candice
2017-10-01
Public perceptions of the climate debate predominantly frame the key actors as climate scientists versus sceptical voices; however, it is unclear why climate scientists and sceptical voices choose to participate in this antagonistic and polarised public battle. A narrative interview approach is used to better understand the underlying rationales behind 22 climate scientists' and sceptical voices' engagement in the climate debate, potential commonalities, as well as each actor's ability to be critically self-reflexive. Several overlapping rationales are identified including a sense of duty to publicly engage, agreement that complete certainty about the complex assemblage of climate change is unattainable and that political factors are central to the climate debate. We argue that a focus on potential overlaps in perceptions and rationales as well as the ability to be critically self-reflexive may encourage constructive discussion among actors previously engaged in purposefully antagonistic exchange on climate change.
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Rooney-Varga, J. N.; Sterman, J.; Sawin, E.; Jones, A.; Merhi, H.; Hunt, C.
2012-12-01
Climate change, its mitigation, and adaption to its impacts are among the greatest challenges of our times. Despite the importance of societal decisions in determining climate change outcomes, flawed mental models about climate change remain widespread, are often deeply entrenched, and present significant barriers to understanding and decision-making around climate change. Here, we describe two simulation role-playing games that combine active, affective, and analytical learning to enable shifts of deeply held conceptions about climate change. The games, World Climate and Future Climate, use a state-of-the-art decision support simulation, C-ROADS (Climate Rapid Overview and Decision Support) to provide users with immediate feedback on the outcomes of their mitigation strategies at the national level, including global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and concentrations, mean temperature changes, sea level rise, and ocean acidification. C-ROADS outcomes are consistent with the atmosphere-ocean general circulation models (AOGCMS), such as those used by the IPCC, but runs in less than one second on ordinary laptops, providing immediate feedback to participants on the consequences of their proposed policies. Both World Climate and Future Climate role-playing games provide immersive, situated learning experiences that motivate active engagement with climate science and policy. In World Climate, participants play the role of United Nations climate treaty negotiators. Participant emissions reductions proposals are continually assessed through interactive exploration of the best available science through C-ROADS. Future Climate focuses on time delays in the climate and energy systems. Participants play the roles of three generations: today's policymakers, today's youth, and 'just born.' The game unfolds in three rounds 25 simulated years apart. In the first round, only today's policymakers make decisions; In the next round, the young become the policymakers and inherit the
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Jaspal, Rusi; Nerlich, Brigitte
2014-02-01
Climate change has become a pressing environmental concern for scientists, social commentators and politicians. Previous social science research has explored media representations of climate change in various temporal and geographical contexts. Through the lens of Social Representations Theory, this article provides a detailed qualitative thematic analysis of media representations of climate change in the 1988 British broadsheet press, given that this year constitutes an important juncture in this transition of climate change from the domain of science to that of the socio-political sphere. The following themes are outlined: (i) "Climate change: a multi-faceted threat"; (ii) "Collectivisation of threat"; (iii) "Climate change and the attribution of blame"; and (iv) "Speculative solutions to a complex socio-environmental problem." The article provides detailed empirical insights into the "starting-point" for present-day disputes concerning climate change and lays the theoretical foundations for tracking the continuities and discontinuities characterising social representations of climate change in the future.
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Climate 2012 - Status and perspectives for Danish climate policy
International Nuclear Information System (INIS)
2000-03-01
Through 'Climate 2012'. The Danish government wishes to give a total survey of the Danish climate policy. The intention with 'Climate 2012' is to lead to the Danish Parliament's ratification of the Kyoto-protocol. 'Climate 2012' is the result of a renewed analysis and updating of the Danish policy pursued till now relating to the emission of greenhouse gasses, so that this policy now more precisely includes all elements contained in the Kyoto-protocol. The climate strategy is also the basis for the coming years' national work within the climate area, through implementing a range of analyses and surveys review a range of aspects the climate area, of relevance to the Danish climate policy in the short and long term. Finally the climate strategy is the basis for an evaluation of the demand for establishing a strengthened Danish network within the climate area. (EHS)
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Rethinking Climate Education: Climate as Entanglement
Verlie, Blanche
2017-01-01
Climate change education often relies on climate science's mantra that climate change is human induced, not natural. In a posttruth world, this can seem unequivocally necessary. However, I worry that this perpetuates the human/nature dualism and may thus reiterate the very distinction we are seeking to transgress. In this article, I outline my…
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Climate and economy. Climate Policy Dossier
International Nuclear Information System (INIS)
Gielen, A.M.; Koutstaal, P.R.; De Groot, H.L.F.; Tang, P.J.G.
2001-01-01
In this introductory article an overview is given of what can be expected in this dossier on climate policy in the Netherlands, focusing on the economic analysis of climate policy and climatic change. Attention will be paid to flexible mechanisms to reduce the costs of such policy and visions of interested parties. 1 ref
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Climate engineering and the risk of rapid climate change
International Nuclear Information System (INIS)
Ross, Andrew; Damon Matthews, H
2009-01-01
Recent research has highlighted risks associated with the use of climate engineering as a method of stabilizing global temperatures, including the possibility of rapid climate warming in the case of abrupt removal of engineered radiative forcing. In this study, we have used a simple climate model to estimate the likely range of temperature changes associated with implementation and removal of climate engineering. In the absence of climate engineering, maximum annual rates of warming ranged from 0.015 to 0.07 deg. C/year, depending on the model's climate sensitivity. Climate engineering resulted in much higher rates of warming, with the temperature change in the year following the removal of climate engineering ranging from 0.13 to 0.76 deg. C. High rates of temperature change were sustained for two decades following the removal of climate engineering; rates of change of 0.5 (0.3,0.1) deg. C/decade were exceeded over a 20 year period with 15% (75%, 100%) likelihood. Many ecosystems could be negatively affected by these rates of temperature change; our results suggest that climate engineering in the absence of deep emissions cuts could arguably constitute increased risk of dangerous anthropogenic interference in the climate system under the criteria laid out in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.
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Funding climate adaptation strategies with climate derivatives
Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)
L. Richard Little
2015-01-01
Full Text Available Climate adaptation requires large capital investments that could be provided not only by traditional sources like governments and banks, but also by derivatives markets. Such markets would allow two parties with different tolerances and expectations about climate risks to transact for their mutual benefit and, in so doing, finance climate adaptation. Here we calculate the price of a derivative called a European put option, based on future sea surface temperature (SST in Tasmania, Australia, with an 18 °C strike threshold. This price represents a quantifiable indicator of climate risk, and forms the basis for aquaculture industries exposed to the risk of higher SST to finance adaptation strategies through the sale of derivative contracts. Such contracts provide a real incentive to parties with different climate outlooks, or risk exposure to take a market assessment of climate change.
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Climate indices of Iran under climate change
alireza kochaki; mehdi nasiry; gholamali kamali
2009-01-01
Global warming will affect all climatic variables and particularly rainfall patterns. The purpose of present investigation was to predict climatic parameters of Iran under future climate change and to compare them with the present conditions. For this reason, UKMO General Circulation Model was used for the year 2025 and 2050. By running the model, minimum and maximum monthly temperature and also maximum monthly rainfall for the representative climate stations were calculated and finally the e...
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Climate finance, climate investors and assets for low emission development
Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)
Collins C Ngwakwe
2015-05-01
Full Text Available This research examines the relationship between climate finance, growth in climate investors and growth in climate assets for low emission development. It also evaluates the effect of climate policy evolution on the growth of climate investors and climate assets. Adopting a positivist paradigm, the paper makes use of a quantitative research approach and applies the causal and correlational research design. The paper made use of secondary data from the World Bank Carbon Finance Unit and from the Carbon Disclosure Project (ADP. The major objective was to examine the combined effect of climate finance and climate policy on the growth of carbon investors and carbon assets for the companies in the Carbon Disclosure Project which includes the 100 JSE companies. Findings from the test reveal that the combined effect of growth in climate finance and climate policy evolution has a significant relationship with growth in climate investors and climate assets. Given this result the paper proceeded to examine if the growth in climate finance has any correlation with South Africa’s emission reduction trend. Results however indicate that South Africa’s GHG emission trend does not correlate with climate finance availability; GHG emissions in South Africa have continued to soar despite a seeming growth in climate finance. The paper reasoned that the global climate finance might not be effectively available to corporates in South Africa at the expected level of financing to initiate the expected level of climate investment to effect a significant reduction in greenhouse gas emissions. This confirms literature assertions that global climate finance might not easily be accessible, at least to entities in developing countries. In conclusion, the paper suggests the establishment of a Southern African Climate Finance pool where the public and private sector can contribute and that such pool should be made easily available to carbon investors at a cheap rate with
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Brey, J. A.; Kauffman, C.; Geer, I. W.; Mills, E. W.; Nugnes, K. A.; Stimach, A. E.
2015-12-01
As the effects of climate change become more profound, climate literacy becomes increasingly important. The American Meteorological Society (AMS) responds to this need through the publication of Our Changing Climate and Living With Our Changing Climate. Both publications incorporate the latest scientific understandings of Earth's climate system from reports such as IPCC AR5 and the USGCRP's Third National Climate Assessment. Topic In Depth sections appear throughout each chapter and lead to more extensive, multidisciplinary information related to various topics. Additionally, each chapter closes with a For Further Exploration essay, which addresses specific topics that complement a chapter concept. Web Resources, which encourage additional exploration of chapter content, and Scientific Literature, from which chapter content was derived can also be found at the conclusion of each chapter. Our Changing Climate covers a breadth of topics, including the scientific principles that govern Earth's climate system and basic statistics and geospatial tools used to investigate the system. Released in fall 2015, Living With Our Changing Climate takes a more narrow approach and investigates human and ecosystem vulnerabilities to climate change, the role of energy choices in affecting climate, actions humans can take through adaption, mitigation, and policy to lessen vulnerabilities, and psychological and financial reasons behind climate change denial. While Living With Our Changing Climate is intended for programs looking to add a climate element into their curriculum, Our Changing Climate is part of the AMS Climate Studies course. In a 2015 survey of California University of Pennsylvania undergraduate students using Our Changing Climate, 82% found it comfortable to read and utilized its interactive components and resources. Both ebooks illuminate the multidisciplinary aspect of climate change, providing the opportunity for a more sustainable future.
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Climate variability and vulnerability to climate change: a review
Thornton, Philip K; Ericksen, Polly J; Herrero, Mario; Challinor, Andrew J
2014-01-01
The focus of the great majority of climate change impact studies is on changes in mean climate. In terms of climate model output, these changes are more robust than changes in climate variability. By concentrating on changes in climate means, the full impacts of climate change on biological and human systems are probably being seriously underestimated. Here, we briefly review the possible impacts of changes in climate variability and the frequency of extreme events on biological and food systems, with a focus on the developing world. We present new analysis that tentatively links increases in climate variability with increasing food insecurity in the future. We consider the ways in which people deal with climate variability and extremes and how they may adapt in the future. Key knowledge and data gaps are highlighted. These include the timing and interactions of different climatic stresses on plant growth and development, particularly at higher temperatures, and the impacts on crops, livestock and farming systems of changes in climate variability and extreme events on pest-weed-disease complexes. We highlight the need to reframe research questions in such a way that they can provide decision makers throughout the food system with actionable answers, and the need for investment in climate and environmental monitoring. Improved understanding of the full range of impacts of climate change on biological and food systems is a critical step in being able to address effectively the effects of climate variability and extreme events on human vulnerability and food security, particularly in agriculturally based developing countries facing the challenge of having to feed rapidly growing populations in the coming decades. PMID:24668802
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Climate and society: passed climates, man era, future climate: essential reference marks
International Nuclear Information System (INIS)
Melieres, M.A.; Marechal, Ch.
2010-01-01
This teaching book takes stock of the climate change question which has moved beyond the simple scientific framework. Man will play a key role in the changes to come and the choices he is going to make will have a major impact on our environment and on our societies. The aim of this book is to draw out the essential marks from the multiple disciplines involved in the study of climate change in order to get a global overview of the question. Starting from simple mechanisms showing up the driving components of the climate equilibrium (like the greenhouse effect), the authors analyse the climates of the past, and describe the different causes of the actual climate change and its possible evolution in the future. The global nature of the climate warming in progress is demonstrated and some of its actual impacts on the environment are shown up. The importance of the anthropic influence in this change is underlined as well as the stakes of the mastery of our greenhouse gas emissions. (J.S.)
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Climate Informatics: Accelerating Discovering in Climate Science with Machine Learning
Monteleoni, Claire; Schmidt, Gavin A.; McQuade, Scott
2014-01-01
The goal of climate informatics, an emerging discipline, is to inspire collaboration between climate scientists and data scientists, in order to develop tools to analyze complex and ever-growing amounts of observed and simulated climate data, and thereby bridge the gap between data and understanding. Here, recent climate informatics work is presented, along with details of some of the field's remaining challenges. Given the impact of climate change, understanding the climate system is an international priority. The goal of climate informatics is to inspire collaboration between climate scientists and data scientists, in order to develop tools to analyze complex and ever-growing amounts of observed and simulated climate data, and thereby bridge the gap between data and understanding. Here, recent climate informatics work is presented, along with details of some of the remaining challenges.
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Climate change and climate policy; Klimaendringer og klimapolitikk
Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)
Alfsen, Knut H.; Kolshus, Hans H.; Torvanger, Asbjoern
2000-08-01
The climate issue is a great political and scientific challenge for several reasons: (1) There are many uncertain aspects of the climate problem, such as future emission of climate gases, the response of the climate system upon these gases, and the effects of climate changes. (2) It is probable, however, that anthropogenic emission of climate gases, deforestation etc. will cause noticeable climate changes in the future. This might be observed as increased frequency of extreme weather situations. This appears to be a greater threat than a gradual increase of temperature and precipitation. (3) Since the climate system is large and react only relatively slowly on changes in for instance the emission of climate gases, the climate problem can only be solved by means of long-term measures. (4) The climate changes may be irreversible. A rational short-term strategy is to ensure maximum flexibility, which can be done by ''slowing down'' (curtailing emissions) and by avoiding irreversible actions as much as possible. The long-term challenge is to develop an economically responsible alternative to the present fossil-based energy system that permits carbon-efficient technologies to compete on price with coal and unconventional oil and gas. Norway is in a special position by being a large exporter of fossil fuel and at the same time wanting to appear responsible in environmental matters. This combination may incur considerable expenses upon Norway and it is therefore important that environmental commitments like the Kyoto agreement can be honoured to the lowest possible cost. The costs can be minimized by: (1) minimizing the measure costs in Norway, (2) working to make the international quota price as low as possible, and (3) reducing the loss of petroleum income as much as possible. This report describes the earth's climate history, the forces behind climatic changes and what the prospects for the future look like. It also reviews what is being done
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Arndt, D. S.
2014-12-01
In recent years, much attention has been dedicated to the development, testing and implementation of climate indicators. Several Federal agencies and academic groups have commissioned suites of indicators drawing upon and aggregating information available across the spectrum of climate data stewards and providers. As a long-time participant in the applied climatology discipline, NOAA's National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) has generated climate indicators for several decades. Traditionally, these indicators were developed for sectors with long-standing relationships with, and needs of, the applied climatology field. These have recently been adopted and adapted to meet the needs of sectors who have newfound sensitivities to climate and needs for climate data. Information and indices from NOAA's National Climatic Data Center have been prominent components of these indicator suites, and in some cases have been drafted in toto by these aggregators, often with improvements to the communicability and aesthetics of the indicators themselves. Across this history of supporting needs for indicators, NCDC climatologists developed a handful of practical approaches and philosophies that inform a successful climate monitoring product. This manuscript and presentation will demonstrate the utility this set of practical applications that translate raw data into useful information.
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Implementing the Climate Action Plan | Climate Neutral Research Campuses |
considerations for building a portfolio, including: Compatibility with organizational mission: All climate NREL Implementing the Climate Action Plan Implementing the Climate Action Plan When implementing climate action plans on research campuses, two important and related questions must be answered
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Managing climate change refugia for climate adaptation
Toni Lyn Morelli; Christopher Daly; Solomon Z. Dobrowski; Deanna M. Dulen; Joseph L. Ebersole; Stephen T. Jackson; Jessica D. Lundquist; Connie Millar; Sean P. Maher; William B. Monahan; Koren R. Nydick; Kelly T. Redmond; Sarah C. Sawyer; Sarah Stock; Steven R. Beissinger
2016-01-01
Refugia have long been studied from paleontological and biogeographical perspectives to understand how populations persisted during past periods of unfavorable climate. Recently, researchers have applied the idea to contemporary landscapes to identify climate change refugia, here defined as areas relatively buffered from contemporary climate change over time that...
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Scariest thing about climate change: climate flips
International Nuclear Information System (INIS)
Beaulieu, P.
1997-01-01
The idea that an increase in greenhouse gases will cause the global average temperature to rise slowly over the next decades was discussed. Studies of ice core from Greenland have shown that in the past climate shifts seem to have happened quickly. Some scientists fear that increasingly frequent extreme weather events could be a sign that the climate system is nearing its threshold and a rapid climate flip may be just ahead. In the case of global climatic system, the danger is that stresses from greenhouse gas effects are pushing the present system over the threshold where it must flip into a new warmer system that will be stable, but different from the climate on which our agriculture, economy, settlements and lives depend. 4 refs
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Climate Prediction Center - Outreach: 41st Annual Climate Diagnostics &
home page National Weather Service NWS logo - Click to go to the NWS home page Climate Prediction Annual Climate Diagnostics & Prediction Workshop NOAA's 41st Climate Diagnostics and Prediction Climate Diagnostics Prediction Workshop (CDPW) news, visit the CDPW list server Abstract Submission Has
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Our Changing Climate: A Brand New Way to Study Climate Science
Brey, J. A.; Kauffman, C.; Geer, I.; Nugnes, K. A.; Mills, E. W.
2014-12-01
Earth's climate is inherently variable, but is currently changing at rates unprecedented in recent Earth history. Human activity plays a major role in this change and is projected to do so well into the future. This is the stance taken in Our Changing Climate, the brand new climate science ebook from the American Meteorological Society (AMS). Our Changing Climate investigates Earth's climate system, explores humans' impact on it, and identifies actions needed in response to climate change. Released in August 2014, Our Changing Climate is the result of a year's worth of intensive research and writing, incorporating the latest scientific understandings of Earth's climate system from reports such as IPCC AR5 and the Third National Climate Assessment. To encourage additional exploration of climate science information, scientific literature, from which chapter content was derived, is cited at the conclusion of each chapter. In addition, Topic In Depth sections appear throughout each chapter and lead to more extensive information related to various topics. For example, a Topic In Depth in Chapter 11 describes the effect of climate extremes on ranching enterprises in Nebraska. Climate science is multi-disciplinary and therefore Our Changing Climate covers a breadth of topics. From understanding basic statistics and geospatial tools used to investigate Earth's climate system to examining the psychological and financial reasons behind climate change denial, the AMS believes that a multi-disciplinary approach is the most effective way to increase climate literacy. Our Changing Climate is part of the AMS Climate Studies course which is intended for undergraduate-level students. Other course materials include an eInvestigations Manual and access to the RealTime Climate Portal, both of which provide weekly activities corresponding to that week's chapter content. The RealTime Climate Portal also has links to climate data as well as societal interactions and climate policy
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International Nuclear Information System (INIS)
Fellous, J.L.; Gautier, C.; Andre, J.C.; Balstad, R.; Boucher, O.; Brasseur, G.; Chahine, M.T.; Chanin, M.L.; Ciais, P.; Corell, W.; Duplessy, J.C.; Hourcade, J.C.; Jouzel, J.; Kaufman, Y.J.; Laval, K.; Le Treut, H.; Minster, J.F.; Moore, B. III; Morel, P.; Rasool, S.I.; Remy, F.; Smith, R.C.; Somerville, R.C.J.; Wood, E.F.; Wood, H.; Wunsch, C.
2007-01-01
Climatic change is gaining ground and with no doubt is stimulated by human activities. It is therefore urgent to better understand its nature, importance and potential impacts. The chapters of this book have been written by US and French experts of the global warming question. After a description of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC, GIEC in French) consensus, they present the past and present researches on each of the main component of the climate system, on the question of climatic change impacts and on the possible answers. The conclusion summarizes the results of each chapter. Content: presentation of the IPCC; greenhouse effect, radiation balance and clouds; atmospheric aerosols and climatic change; global water cycle and climate; influence of climatic change on the continental hydrologic cycle; ocean and climate; ice and climate; global carbon cycle; about some impacts of climatic change on Europe and the Atlantic Ocean; interaction between atmospheric chemistry and climate; climate and society, the human dimension. (J.S.)
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Climate engineering research : A precautionary response to climate change?
Reynolds, J.L.; Fleurke, F.M.
2013-01-01
In the face of dire forecasts for anthropogenic climate change, climate engineering is increasingly discussed as a possible additional set of responses to reduce climate change’s threat. These proposals have been controversial, in part because they – like climate change itself – pose uncertain risks
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Climate Prediction Center - Outlooks: CFS Forecast of Seasonal Climate
National Weather Service NWS logo - Click to go to the NWS home page Climate Prediction Center Home Site government Web resources and services. CFS Seasonal Climate Forecasts CFS Forecast of Seasonal Climate discontinued after October 2012. This page displays seasonal climate anomalies from the NCEP coupled forecast
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Abatzoglou, John T.; Dobrowski, Solomon Z.; Parks, Sean A.; Hegewisch, Katherine C.
2018-01-01
We present TerraClimate, a dataset of high-spatial resolution (1/24°, ~4-km) monthly climate and climatic water balance for global terrestrial surfaces from 1958-2015. TerraClimate uses climatically aided interpolation, combining high-spatial resolution climatological normals from the WorldClim dataset, with coarser resolution time varying (i.e., monthly) data from other sources to produce a monthly dataset of precipitation, maximum and minimum temperature, wind speed, vapor pressure, and solar radiation. TerraClimate additionally produces monthly surface water balance datasets using a water balance model that incorporates reference evapotranspiration, precipitation, temperature, and interpolated plant extractable soil water capacity. These data provide important inputs for ecological and hydrological studies at global scales that require high spatial resolution and time varying climate and climatic water balance data. We validated spatiotemporal aspects of TerraClimate using annual temperature, precipitation, and calculated reference evapotranspiration from station data, as well as annual runoff from streamflow gauges. TerraClimate datasets showed noted improvement in overall mean absolute error and increased spatial realism relative to coarser resolution gridded datasets.
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On climate prediction: how much can we expect from climate memory?
Yuan, Naiming; Huang, Yan; Duan, Jianping; Zhu, Congwen; Xoplaki, Elena; Luterbacher, Jürg
2018-03-01
Slowing variability in climate system is an important source of climate predictability. However, it is still challenging for current dynamical models to fully capture the variability as well as its impacts on future climate. In this study, instead of simulating the internal multi-scale oscillations in dynamical models, we discussed the effects of internal variability in terms of climate memory. By decomposing climate state x(t) at a certain time point t into memory part M(t) and non-memory part ɛ (t) , climate memory effects from the past 30 years on climate prediction are quantified. For variables with strong climate memory, high variance (over 20% ) in x(t) is explained by the memory part M(t), and the effects of climate memory are non-negligible for most climate variables, but the precipitation. Regarding of multi-steps climate prediction, a power law decay of the explained variance was found, indicating long-lasting climate memory effects. The explained variances by climate memory can remain to be higher than 10% for more than 10 time steps. Accordingly, past climate conditions can affect both short (monthly) and long-term (interannual, decadal, or even multidecadal) climate predictions. With the memory part M(t) precisely calculated from Fractional Integral Statistical Model, one only needs to focus on the non-memory part ɛ (t) , which is an important quantity that determines climate predictive skills.
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Climate change velocity underestimates climate change exposure in mountainous regions
Solomon Z. Dobrowski; Sean A. Parks
2016-01-01
Climate change velocity is a vector depiction of the rate of climate displacement used for assessing climate change impacts. Interpreting velocity requires an assumption that climate trajectory length is proportional to climate change exposure; longer paths suggest greater exposure. However, distance is an imperfect measure of exposure because it does not...
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Climate Matters: Increasing Climate Literacy Through Broadcast Meteorologists
Sanford, T. J.; Placky, B. W.
2015-12-01
Broadcast meteorologists are among the most trusted members of the media landscape and they have a unique opportunity to reach the broad public with information about climate change. A recent survey by Maibach, et al. (2015) has shown that more than 90% of TV weathercasters think that their audience is at least somewhat interested in learning about the local impacts of climate change and 7 in 10 think that it is appropriate for them to report the science of climate change to their audience. But about half of these TV weathercasters have experienced obstacles to reporting climate change - citing lack of time to research and produce material, in addition to lack of access to appropriate visuals/graphics and access to trusted scientific information. Climate Matters is an NSF funded program that partners with broadcast meteorologists to deliver scientifically sound climate change information to the public that is local and relevant. A team of climate scientists, meteorologists, data analysts, journalists, and multimedia artists analyze and prepare content on a weekly basis so that it may be readily included in a broadcast weather segment, online or during community outreach. The program started as a pilot project with just one meteorologist in 2010 before Climate Central launched a full-time, nationwide program in 2012. Since then, Climate Matters has grown to include over 250 meteorologists strong and in more than 100 markets across the country, including Spanish language TV stations.
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Climates Past, Present, and Yet-to-Come Shape Climate Change Vulnerabilities.
Nadeau, Christopher P; Urban, Mark C; Bridle, Jon R
2017-10-01
Climate change is altering life at multiple scales, from genes to ecosystems. Predicting the vulnerability of populations to climate change is crucial to mitigate negative impacts. We suggest that regional patterns of spatial and temporal climatic variation scaled to the traits of an organism can predict where and why populations are most vulnerable to climate change. Specifically, historical climatic variation affects the sensitivity and response capacity of populations to climate change by shaping traits and the genetic variation in those traits. Present and future climatic variation can affect both climate change exposure and population responses. We provide seven predictions for how climatic variation might affect the vulnerability of populations to climate change and suggest key directions for future research. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
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Prospects for future climate: A special US/USSR report on climate and climate change
International Nuclear Information System (INIS)
MacCracken, M.C.; Budyko, M.I.; Hecht, A.D.; Izrael, Y.A.
1990-01-01
Starting with the US-USSR Agreement on Protection of the Environment signed in 1972, the two nations have cooperated in joint research on atmospheric and environmental problems. The result of these efforts has been an innovative approach to projecting future climate change based on what has been learned about past warm periods and what can be learned from models. The chapters in this document explore the following: past changes in climate, both paleoclimatology and changes in the recent past; changes in atmospheric composition; estimates of greenhouse-induced change including the use of both empirical methods and climate models; impacts of climate change on water resources and agriculture in the two countries; and prospects for future climate changes
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Climate Action Tracker Update. Climate Shuffle
Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)
Hoehne, N.; Fekete, H.; Vieweg, M.; Hare, B.; Schaeffer, M.; Rocha, M.; Larkin, J.; Guetschow, J.; Jeffery, L.
2011-11-15
The Climate Action Tracker (CAT) compares and assesses national and global action against a range of different climate targets across all relevant time frames, starting with an ongoing analysis of countries' current emission reduction pledges. National action on climate change mitigation appears to be joining the international climate negotiations in the new and ever popular 'climate shuffle' dance. It involves maximum effort and motion while staying in the same spot, or even, in some cases, going backwards. Recent emissions trends and estimates of the effects of those policies in place and proposed lead to a new estimate that warming is likely to approach 4C by 2100, significantly above the warming that would result from full implementation of the pledges (3.3C). The continuous global fossil-fuel intensive development of the past decade suggests that high warming levels of 4C are more plausible than assuming full implementation of current pledges. Evidence is ever increasing that existing and planned policies are not sufficient for countries to meet these pledges.
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International Nuclear Information System (INIS)
Fellous, J.L.
2005-02-01
This book starts with a series of about 20 preconceived ideas about climate and climatic change and analyses each of them in the light of the present day knowledge. Using this approach, it makes a status of the reality of the climatic change, of its causes and of the measures to be implemented to limit its impacts and reduce its most harmful consequences. (J.S.)
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Climate change projections: past and future mysteries of climate science
International Nuclear Information System (INIS)
Meehl, Gerald A.
2007-01-01
Full text: Full text: The history of climate change has been wrapped in mysteries. Some have been solved, and we await the outcome of others. The major mystery of 20th century climate was why did temperatures rise in the early part of the century, level off, and then rise rapidly again after the 1970s? It has only been in the past seven years that advances in climate modelling have allowed us to deconstruct 20th century climate to pull apart the separate influences of natural and human-caused factors. This has allowed us to understand the subtle interplay between these various influences that produced the temperature time evolution. Another mystery has involved extreme weather and climate events. Again, climate models have allowed us to quantify how the small changes in average climate translate into much larger changes of regional extremes. The biggest remaining mysteries in climate science involve the future, and how the climate will evolve over the coming century. Up until now, various scenarios postulating different possible outcomes for 21st century climate, assuming different types of human activities, have been run in the climate models to provide a wide range of possible futures. However, more recently the outlook for global warming is being framed as a combination of mitigation and adaptation. If policy actions are taken to mitigate part of the problem of global warming, then climate models must be relied on to quantify the time-evolving picture of how much regional climate change we must adapt to. Solving this mystery will be the biggest and most important challenge ever taken on by the climate modelling community
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International Nuclear Information System (INIS)
Anon.
1990-01-01
In this paper, the authors discuss in brief the magnitude and rate of past changes in climate and examine the various factors influencing climate in order to place the potential warming due to increasing greenhouse gas concentrations in context. Feedback mechanisms that can amplify or lessen imposed climate changes are discussed next. The overall sensitivity of climate to changes in forcing is then considered, followed by a discussion of the time-dependent response of the Earth system. The focus is on global temperature as an indicator for the magnitude of climatic change
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International Nuclear Information System (INIS)
R.M. Forester
2000-01-01
This Analysis/Model Report (AMR) documents an analysis that was performed to estimate climatic variables for the next 10,000 years by forecasting the timing and nature of climate change at Yucca Mountain (YM), Nevada (Figure l), the site of a potential repository for high-level radioactive waste. The future-climate estimates are based on an analysis of past-climate data from analog meteorological stations, and this AMR provides the rationale for the selection of these analog stations. The stations selected provide an upper and a lower climate bound for each future climate, and the data from those sites will provide input to the infiltration model (USGS 2000) and for the total system performance assessment for the Site Recommendation (TSPA-SR) at YM. Forecasting long-term future climates, especially for the next 10,000 years, is highly speculative and rarely attempted. A very limited literature exists concerning the subject, largely from the British radioactive waste disposal effort. The discussion presented here is one method, among many, of establishing upper and lower bounds for future climate estimates. The method used here involves selecting a particular past climate from many past climates, as an analog for future climate. Other studies might develop a different rationale or select other past climates resulting in a different future climate analog
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Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)
R.M. Forester
2000-03-14
This Analysis/Model Report (AMR) documents an analysis that was performed to estimate climatic variables for the next 10,000 years by forecasting the timing and nature of climate change at Yucca Mountain (YM), Nevada (Figure l), the site of a potential repository for high-level radioactive waste. The future-climate estimates are based on an analysis of past-climate data from analog meteorological stations, and this AMR provides the rationale for the selection of these analog stations. The stations selected provide an upper and a lower climate bound for each future climate, and the data from those sites will provide input to the infiltration model (USGS 2000) and for the total system performance assessment for the Site Recommendation (TSPA-SR) at YM. Forecasting long-term future climates, especially for the next 10,000 years, is highly speculative and rarely attempted. A very limited literature exists concerning the subject, largely from the British radioactive waste disposal effort. The discussion presented here is one method, among many, of establishing upper and lower bounds for future climate estimates. The method used here involves selecting a particular past climate from many past climates, as an analog for future climate. Other studies might develop a different rationale or select other past climates resulting in a different future climate analog.
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Climate change and nutrition: creating a climate for nutrition security.
Tirado, M C; Crahay, P; Mahy, L; Zanev, C; Neira, M; Msangi, S; Brown, R; Scaramella, C; Costa Coitinho, D; Müller, A
2013-12-01
Climate change further exacerbates the enormous existing burden of undernutrition. It affects food and nutrition security and undermines current efforts to reduce hunger and promote nutrition. Undernutrition in turn undermines climate resilience and the coping strategies of vulnerable populations. The objectives of this paper are to identify and undertake a cross-sectoral analysis of the impacts of climate change on nutrition security and the existing mechanisms, strategies, and policies to address them. A cross-sectoral analysis of the impacts of climate change on nutrition security and the mechanisms and policies to address them was guided by an analytical framework focused on the three 'underlying causes' of undernutrition: 1) household food access, 2) maternal and child care and feeding practices, 3) environmental health and health access. The analytical framework includes the interactions of the three underlying causes of undernutrition with climate change,vulnerability, adaptation and mitigation. Within broad efforts on climate change mitigation and adaptation and climate-resilient development, a combination of nutrition-sensitive adaptation and mitigation measures, climate-resilient and nutrition-sensitive agricultural development, social protection, improved maternal and child care and health, nutrition-sensitive risk reduction and management, community development measures, nutrition-smart investments, increased policy coherence, and institutional and cross-sectoral collaboration are proposed as a means to address the impacts of climate change to food and nutrition security. This paper proposes policy directions to address nutrition in the climate change agenda and recommendations for consideration by the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). Nutrition and health stakeholders need to be engaged in key climate change adaptation and mitigation initiatives, including science-based assessment by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC
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Shepardson, Daniel P.; Niyogi, Dev; Roychoudhury, Anita; Hirsch, Andrew
2012-01-01
Today there is much interest in teaching secondary students about climate change. Much of this effort has focused directly on students' understanding of climate change. We hypothesize, however, that in order for students to understand climate change they must first understand climate as a system and how changes to this system due to both natural…
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Using Web GIS "Climate" for Adaptation to Climate Change
Gordova, Yulia; Martynova, Yulia; Shulgina, Tamara
2015-04-01
A work is devoted to the application of an information-computational Web GIS "Climate" developed by joint team of the Institute of Monitoring of Climatic and Ecological Systems SB RAS and Tomsk State University to raise awareness about current and future climate change as a basis for further adaptation. Web-GIS "Climate» (http://climate.scert.ru/) based on modern concepts of Web 2.0 provides opportunities to study regional climate change and its consequences by providing access to climate and weather models, a large set of geophysical data and means of processing and visualization. Also, the system is used for the joint development of software applications by distributed research teams, research based on these applications and undergraduate and graduate students training. In addition, the system capabilities allow creating information resources to raise public awareness about climate change, its causes and consequences, which is a necessary step for the subsequent adaptation to these changes. Basic information course on climate change is placed in the public domain and is aimed at local population. Basic concepts and problems of modern climate change and its possible consequences are set out and illustrated in accessible language. Particular attention is paid to regional climate changes. In addition to the information part, the course also includes a selection of links to popular science network resources on current issues in Earth Sciences and a number of practical tasks to consolidate the material. These tasks are performed for a particular territory. Within the tasks users need to analyze the prepared within the "Climate" map layers and answer questions of direct interest to the public: "How did the minimum value of winter temperatures change in your area?", "What are the dynamics of maximum summer temperatures?", etc. Carrying out the analysis of the dynamics of climate change contributes to a better understanding of climate processes and further adaptation
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Climate Change Mitigation A Balanced Approach to Climate Change
2012-01-01
This book provides a fresh and innovative perspective on climate change policy. By emphasizing the multiple facets of climate policy, from mitigation to adaptation, from technological innovation and diffusion to governance issues, it contains a comprehensive overview of the economic and policy dimensions of the climate problem. The keyword of the book is balance. The book clarifies that climate change cannot be controlled by sacrificing economic growth and many other urgent global issues. At the same time, action to control climate change cannot be delayed, even though gradually implemented. Therefore, on the one hand climate policy becomes pervasive and affects all dimensions of international policy. On the other hand, climate policy cannot be too ambitious: a balanced approach between mitigation and adaptation, between economic growth and resource management, between short term development efforts and long term innovation investments, should be adopted. I recommend its reading. Carlo Carraro, President, Ca�...
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Science Partnerships Contact Us Climate Action Team & Climate Action Initiative The Climate Action programs and the state's Climate Adaptation Strategy. The CAT members are state agency secretaries and the . See CAT reports Climate Action Team Pages CAT Home Members Working Groups Reports Back to Top
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International Nuclear Information System (INIS)
1995-01-01
In this article the following question is answered. What is the climate? What factors do determine our climate? What is solar radiation? How does solar radiation relate to the earth's energy? What is greenhouse effect? What role does the greenhouse effect play in the global ecosystem? How does the water cycle affect climate? What is drought? What role do oceans play in influencing climate. (author)
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Successful Massive Open Online Climate Course on Climate Science and Psychology
Nuccitelli, D. A.; Cook, J.
2015-12-01
In 2015, the University of Queensland and edX launched a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC), 'Making Sense of Climate Science Denial.' The MOOC debunked approximately 50 common climate myths using elements of both physical science and psychology. Students learned how to recognise the social and psychological drivers of climate science denial, how to better understand climate change, how to identify the techniques and fallacies that climate myths employ to distort climate science, and how to effectively debunk climate misinformation. Contributors to the website Skeptical Science delivered the lectures, which were reinforced via interviews with climate science and psychology experts. Over 15,000 students from 167 countries enrolled in the course, and student feedback was overwhelmingly positive. This MOOC provides a model for effective climate science education.
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Climate changes over the past millennium: Relationships with Mediterranean climates
International Nuclear Information System (INIS)
Mann, M.E.
2006-01-01
Evidence is reviewed for climate change and its causes over the interval spanning roughly the past millennium. Particular emphasis is placed on patterns of climate change influencing Mediterranean climates of the Northern Hemisphere. The evidence is taken from studies using high-resolution climate proxy data sources, and climate modeling simulations. The available evidence suggests that forced changes in dynamical modes of variability including the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) and El Nino/Southern Oscillation (ENSO) have played a key role in the patterns of climate variability in Mediterranean regions over the past millennium
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Climate change affects agricultural producers because agriculture and fisheries depend on specific climate conditions. Temperature changes can cause crop planting dates to shift. Droughts and floods due to climate change may hinder farming practices.
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Climate change 101 : understanding and responding to global climate change
2009-01-01
To inform the climate change dialogue, the Pew Center on Global Climate Change and the Pew Center on the States have developed a series of brief reports entitled Climate Change 101: Understanding and Responding to Global Climate Change. These reports...
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Designing ecological climate change impact assessments to reflect key climatic drivers.
Sofaer, Helen R; Barsugli, Joseph J; Jarnevich, Catherine S; Abatzoglou, John T; Talbert, Marian K; Miller, Brian W; Morisette, Jeffrey T
2017-07-01
Identifying the climatic drivers of an ecological system is a key step in assessing its vulnerability to climate change. The climatic dimensions to which a species or system is most sensitive - such as means or extremes - can guide methodological decisions for projections of ecological impacts and vulnerabilities. However, scientific workflows for combining climate projections with ecological models have received little explicit attention. We review Global Climate Model (GCM) performance along different dimensions of change and compare frameworks for integrating GCM output into ecological models. In systems sensitive to climatological means, it is straightforward to base ecological impact assessments on mean projected changes from several GCMs. Ecological systems sensitive to climatic extremes may benefit from what we term the 'model space' approach: a comparison of ecological projections based on simulated climate from historical and future time periods. This approach leverages the experimental framework used in climate modeling, in which historical climate simulations serve as controls for future projections. Moreover, it can capture projected changes in the intensity and frequency of climatic extremes, rather than assuming that future means will determine future extremes. Given the recent emphasis on the ecological impacts of climatic extremes, the strategies we describe will be applicable across species and systems. We also highlight practical considerations for the selection of climate models and data products, emphasizing that the spatial resolution of the climate change signal is generally coarser than the grid cell size of downscaled climate model output. Our review illustrates how an understanding of how climate model outputs are derived and downscaled can improve the selection and application of climatic data used in ecological modeling. © 2017 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
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Greenhouse effect and climate; Effet de serre et climat
Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)
Poitou, J
2008-04-15
In the framework of the climatic change, the author aims to explain the phenomena of greenhouse effect. He details the historical aspects of the scientific knowledge in the domain, the gases produced, some characteristic of the greenhouse effect, the other actors which contribute to the climate, the climate simulation, the different factors of climate change since 1750 and the signs of the global heating. (A.L.B.)
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Targeting climate diversity in conservation planning to build resilience to climate change
Heller, Nicole E.; Kreitler, Jason R.; Ackerly, David; Weiss, Stuart; Recinos, Amanda; Branciforte, Ryan; Flint, Lorraine E.; Flint, Alan L.; Micheli, Elisabeth
2015-01-01
Climate change is raising challenging concerns for systematic conservation planning. Are methods based on the current spatial patterns of biodiversity effective given long-term climate change? Some conservation scientists argue that planning should focus on protecting the abiotic diversity in the landscape, which drives patterns of biological diversity, rather than focusing on the distribution of focal species, which shift in response to climate change. Climate is one important abiotic driver of biodiversity patterns, as different climates host different biological communities and genetic pools. We propose conservation networks that capture the full range of climatic diversity in a region will improve the resilience of biotic communities to climate change compared to networks that do not. In this study we used historical and future hydro-climate projections from the high resolution Basin Characterization Model to explore the utility of directly targeting climatic diversity in planning. Using the spatial planning tool, Marxan, we designed conservation networks to capture the diversity of climate types, at the regional and sub-regional scale, and compared them to networks we designed to capture the diversity of vegetation types. By focusing on the Conservation Lands Network (CLN) of the San Francisco Bay Area as a real-world case study, we compared the potential resilience of networks by examining two factors: the range of climate space captured, and climatic stability to 18 future climates, reflecting different emission scenarios and global climate models. We found that the climate-based network planned at the sub-regional scale captured a greater range of climate space and showed higher climatic stability than the vegetation and regional based-networks. At the same time, differences among network scenarios are small relative to the variance in climate stability across global climate models. Across different projected futures, topographically heterogeneous areas
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DEFF Research Database (Denmark)
Rasmussen, Torben Valdbjørn; Hansen, Ernst Jan de Place
2011-01-01
This paper presents the effects of climate change relevant for Denmark, including the change in mean year values as well as the extent of maximum and minimum extremes. Described by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the assumptions that the scenarios are based on were outlined...... and evaluated in a Danish context. The uncertainty of the scenarios leaves major challenges that, if not addressed and taken into account in building design, will grow far more serious as climate change progresses. Cases implemented in the Danish building stock illustrate adaptation to climate change...... and illustrate how building design can include mitigating measures to counteract climate change. Cases studied were individual buildings as well as the urban environment. Furthermore the paper describes some of the issues that must be addressed, as the building sector is investing in measures to adapt to climate...
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Climate is the average weather in a place over a period of time. Climate change is major change in temperature, rainfall, snow, ... by natural factors or by human activities. Today climate changes are occurring at an increasingly rapid rate. ...
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Climate Trends and Farmers' Perceptions of Climate Change in Zambia.
Mulenga, Brian P; Wineman, Ayala; Sitko, Nicholas J
2017-02-01
A number of studies use meteorological records to analyze climate trends and assess the impact of climate change on agricultural yields. While these provide quantitative evidence on climate trends and the likely effects thereof, they incorporate limited qualitative analysis of farmers' perceptions of climate change and/or variability. The present study builds on the quantitative methods used elsewhere to analyze climate trends, and in addition compares local narratives of climate change with evidence found in meteorological records in Zambia. Farmers offer remarkably consistent reports of a rainy season that is growing shorter and less predictable. For some climate parameters-notably, rising average temperature-there is a clear overlap between farmers' observations and patterns found in the meteorological records. However, the data do not support the perception that the rainy season used to begin earlier, and we generally do not detect a reported increase in the frequency of dry spells. Several explanations for these discrepancies are offered. Further, we provide policy recommendations to help farmers adapt to climate change/variability, as well as suggestions to shape future climate change policies, programs, and research in developing countries.
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Climate change refugia as a tool for climate adaptation
Climate change refugia, areas relatively buffered from contemporary climate change so as to increase persistence of valued physical, ecological, and cultural resources, are considered as potential adaptation options in the face of anthropogenic climate change. In a collaboration ...
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Rethinking climate communications and the “psychological climate paradox”
Stoknes, Per Espen
2014-01-01
This is the author’s accepted, refereed and final manuscript to the article Climate science has provided ever more reliable data and models over the last 20–30 years, thereby indicating increasingly severe impacts in the coming decades and centuries. Nonetheless, public concern for climate change and the issue's perceived importance has been declining over the past few decades, thus giving less public support for ambitious climate policies. Conventional climate communication strategies hav...
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Cronin, Thomas M.
2016-01-01
Climate change (including climate variability) refers to regional or global changes in mean climate state or in patterns of climate variability over decades to millions of years often identified using statistical methods and sometimes referred to as changes in long-term weather conditions (IPCC, 2012). Climate is influenced by changes in continent-ocean configurations due to plate tectonic processes, variations in Earth’s orbit, axial tilt and precession, atmospheric greenhouse gas (GHG) concentrations, solar variability, volcanism, internal variability resulting from interactions between the atmosphere, oceans and ice (glaciers, small ice caps, ice sheets, and sea ice), and anthropogenic activities such as greenhouse gas emissions and land use and their effects on carbon cycling.
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Long-term climate monitoring by the global climate observing system
International Nuclear Information System (INIS)
Karl, T.R.
1995-12-01
Is the climate warming? Is the hydrologic cycle changing? Is the atmospheric/oceanic circulation changing? Is the climate becoming more variable or extreme? Is radiative forcing of the climate changing? are complex questions not only from the standpoint of a multi-variate problem, but because of the various aspects of spatial and temporal sampling that must be considered on a global scale. The development of a Global Climate Observing System (GCOS) offers the opportunity for scientists to do something about existing observing deficiencies in light of the importance of documenting long-term climate changes that may already be affected by anthropogenic changes of atmospheric composition and land use as well as other naturally occurring changes. As an important step toward improving the present inadequacies, a workshop was held to help define the long-term monitoring requirements minimally needed to address the five questions posed above, with special emphasis on detecting anthropogenic climate change and its potential impact on managed and unmanaged systems The workshop focussed on three broad areas related to long-term climate monitoring: (a) the scientific rationale for the long-term climate products (including their accuracy, resolution, and homogeneity) required from our observing systems as related to climate monitoring and climate change detection and attribution; (b) the status of long-term climate products and the observing systems from which these data are derived; and (c) implementation strategies necessary to fulfill item (a) in light of existing systems. Item (c) was treated more in terms of feasibility rather than as a specific implementation plan. figs., tabs., refs
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Accounting for multiple climate components when estimating climate change exposure and velocity
Nadeau, Christopher P.; Fuller, Angela K.
2015-01-01
The effect of anthropogenic climate change on organisms will likely be related to climate change exposure and velocity at local and regional scales. However, common methods to estimate climate change exposure and velocity ignore important components of climate that are known to affect the ecology and evolution of organisms.We develop a novel index of climate change (climate overlap) that simultaneously estimates changes in the means, variation and correlation between multiple weather variables. Specifically, we estimate the overlap between multivariate normal probability distributions representing historical and current or projected future climates. We provide methods for estimating the statistical significance of climate overlap values and methods to estimate velocity using climate overlap.We show that climates have changed significantly across 80% of the continental United States in the last 32 years and that much of this change is due to changes in the variation and correlation between weather variables (two statistics that are rarely incorporated into climate change studies). We also show that projected future temperatures are predicted to be locally novel (using climate overlap compared to 1·4 km yr−1 when estimated using traditional methods.Our results suggest that accounting for changes in the means, variation and correlation between multiple weather variables can dramatically affect estimates of climate change exposure and velocity. These climate components are known to affect the ecology and evolution of organisms, but are ignored by most measures of climate change. We conclude with a set of future directions and recommend future work to determine which measures of climate change exposure and velocity are most related to biological responses to climate change.
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John T. Abatzoglou; Solomon Z. Dobrowski; Sean A. Parks; Katherine C. Hegewisch
2018-01-01
We present TerraClimate, a dataset of high-spatial resolution (1/24°, ~4-km) monthly climate and climatic water balance for global terrestrial surfaces from 1958â2015. TerraClimate uses climatically aided interpolation, combining high-spatial resolution climatological normals from the WorldClim dataset, with coarser resolution time varying (i.e., monthly) data from...
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Talking About Climate: a simple tool for everyday climate conversations
Twedt, J. R.; White, R. H.; Tigchelaar, M.; Doroschak, K.; Buchanan, R.; Lundquist, D.
2017-12-01
Public opinion research from the Yale Climate Opinion Maps shows that more than half of Americans are worried about climate change, yet over 70% of Americans rarely or never discuss it with friends or family. Sociologist Kari Marie Norgaard has written about climate denial and how the subject of climate change kills conversation in her interviews, even among people who feel concerned. At the same time, news reporting on climate is often dense with information or scientific nuance and fails to make people feel personally invested in this global issue. This is problematic, because a fair and civil response to our climate crisis will require not only the personal commitment of many, but also collaborative public discourse. For these reasons, we have developed an app that aims to foster meaningful conversation about climate change. The app draws on a database we constructed of historic climate events and relates these events to people's own lives and experiences. Our database is broad and growing, and includes climate change facts, landmark cases in environmental law, social achievements such as the IPCC earning the Nobel Peace Prize, and the personal account from a 12-year old's blog post about FEMA relocation after Hurricane Katrina. Events are stated in plain language and accompanied by open-ended questions to spark discussion. The goal of ClimateConversations is not to inform or persuade, but to support reflective, open-ended conversation, to encourage personal storytelling about climate-related events, and to foster generative dialogue on an issue that all too often causes discomfort and social division. Here we present the climate science, social science, software, and design considerations that went into developing this app. We will also present early quantitative and qualitative metrics of it's use and effectiveness both in classroom and community settings.
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Abatzoglou, John T.; Dobrowski, Solomon Z.; Parks, Sean A.; Hegewisch, Katherine C.
2018-01-01
We present TerraClimate, a dataset of high-spatial resolution (1/24°, ~4-km) monthly climate and climatic water balance for global terrestrial surfaces from 1958–2015. TerraClimate uses climatically aided interpolation, combining high-spatial resolution climatological normals from the WorldClim dataset, with coarser resolution time varying (i.e., monthly) data from other sources to produce a monthly dataset of precipitation, maximum and minimum temperature, wind speed, vapor pressure, and sol...
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Non-climatic thermal adaptation: implications for species' responses to climate warming.
Marshall, David J; McQuaid, Christopher D; Williams, Gray A
2010-10-23
There is considerable interest in understanding how ectothermic animals may physiologically and behaviourally buffer the effects of climate warming. Much less consideration is being given to how organisms might adapt to non-climatic heat sources in ways that could confound predictions for responses of species and communities to climate warming. Although adaptation to non-climatic heat sources (solar and geothermal) seems likely in some marine species, climate warming predictions for marine ectotherms are largely based on adaptation to climatically relevant heat sources (air or surface sea water temperature). Here, we show that non-climatic solar heating underlies thermal resistance adaptation in a rocky-eulittoral-fringe snail. Comparisons of the maximum temperatures of the air, the snail's body and the rock substratum with solar irradiance and physiological performance show that the highest body temperature is primarily controlled by solar heating and re-radiation, and that the snail's upper lethal temperature exceeds the highest climatically relevant regional air temperature by approximately 22°C. Non-climatic thermal adaptation probably features widely among marine and terrestrial ectotherms and because it could enable species to tolerate climatic rises in air temperature, it deserves more consideration in general and for inclusion into climate warming models.
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International Nuclear Information System (INIS)
Orange-Louboutin, Mylene; Robinet, Olivier; Delalande, Daniel; Reysset, Bertrand; De Perthuis, Christian; Le Treut, Herve; Cottenceau, Jean-Baptiste; Ayong, Alain; Daubaire, Aurelien; Gaudin, Thomas
2012-01-01
The contributions of this conference session proposed comments and discussion on the relationship between climate change and 'green' growth, on the status of scientific knowledge on climate change (from global to local), on the way to perform carbon print assessment and to decide which actions to implement, on the costs and opportunity of impacts of climate change, on the economy of adaptation, on the benefits and costs of the adaptation policy, and on impacts of climate change on employment in quantitative terms and in terms of profession types
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Climate of Tajikistan in connection with global climate change
International Nuclear Information System (INIS)
Khakimov, F.Kh.; Mirzokhonova, S.O.; Mirzokhonava, N.A.
2006-01-01
The analysis of global climate change for different periods and its consequences on regional climate is given. The chronology of climate change in Tajikistan in various regions and the reasons leading or resulted to these changes are changes are shown as well
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Research Advances of Impacts of Climate Changes on Crop Climatic Adaptability
Institute of Scientific and Technical Information of China (English)
无
2011-01-01
Agriculture received most direct influences from climate changes. Because of climate changes, agricultural climate resources changed and thus influenced climate adaptability of agricultural products. The growth and output of crops were finally affected. The calculation method and application of agricultural products in recent years were summarized. Several questions about the response of agricultural crops to climate elements were proposed for attention.
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Climate plan 2004; Plan climat 2004
Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)
NONE
2004-07-01
The Climate Plan is an action plan drawn up by the French Government to respond to the climate change challenge, first by 2010 (complying with the Kyoto Protocol target), and, secondly, beyond this date. Projections for France show that national emissions could be 10% higher than the Kyoto target in 2010 if no measures are taken. This is particularly due to increasing emissions in the sectors affecting daily life (residential-tertiary sectors, transport, etc.). For this reason, the Climate Plan contains measures affecting all sectors of the economy and the daily life of all French citizens with a view to economizing the equivalent of 54 million tonnes of CO{sub 2} each year by the year 2010, which will help to reverse the trend significantly. Beyond 2010, the Climate Plan sets out a strategy for technological research which will enable France to meet a target of reducing greenhouse gas emissions four or fivefold by 2050. (author)
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Climate Action Planning Process | Climate Neutral Research Campuses | NREL
Action Planning Process Climate Action Planning Process For research campuses, NREL has developed a five-step process to develop and implement climate action plans: Determine baseline energy consumption Analyze technology options Prepare a plan and set priorities Implement the climate action plan Measure and
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Interactions of Mean Climate Change and Climate Variability on Food Security Extremes
Ruane, Alexander C.; McDermid, Sonali; Mavromatis, Theodoros; Hudson, Nicholas; Morales, Monica; Simmons, John; Prabodha, Agalawatte; Ahmad, Ashfaq; Ahmad, Shakeel; Ahuja, Laj R.
2015-01-01
Recognizing that climate change will affect agricultural systems both through mean changes and through shifts in climate variability and associated extreme events, we present preliminary analyses of climate impacts from a network of 1137 crop modeling sites contributed to the AgMIP Coordinated Climate-Crop Modeling Project (C3MP). At each site sensitivity tests were run according to a common protocol, which enables the fitting of crop model emulators across a range of carbon dioxide, temperature, and water (CTW) changes. C3MP can elucidate several aspects of these changes and quantify crop responses across a wide diversity of farming systems. Here we test the hypothesis that climate change and variability interact in three main ways. First, mean climate changes can affect yields across an entire time period. Second, extreme events (when they do occur) may be more sensitive to climate changes than a year with normal climate. Third, mean climate changes can alter the likelihood of climate extremes, leading to more frequent seasons with anomalies outside of the expected conditions for which management was designed. In this way, shifts in climate variability can result in an increase or reduction of mean yield, as extreme climate events tend to have lower yield than years with normal climate.C3MP maize simulations across 126 farms reveal a clear indication and quantification (as response functions) of mean climate impacts on mean yield and clearly show that mean climate changes will directly affect the variability of yield. Yield reductions from increased climate variability are not as clear as crop models tend to be less sensitive to dangers on the cool and wet extremes of climate variability, likely underestimating losses from water-logging, floods, and frosts.
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The development of climatic scenarios for assessing impacts of climate change
Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)
Carter, T; Tuomenvirta, H [Finnish Meteorological Inst., Helsinki (Finland); Posch, M [National Inst. of Public Health and the Environment, Bilthoven (Netherlands)
1996-12-31
There is a growing recognition that mitigation measures for limiting future global changes in climate due to the enhanced greenhouse effect are unlikely to prevent some changes from occurring. Thus, if climate changes appear to be unavoidable, there is an increased need to evaluate their likely impacts on natural systems and human activities. Most impacts of climate change need to be examined at a regional scale, and their assessment requires up-to-date information on future regional climate changes. Unfortunately, accurate predictions of regional climate are not yet available. Instead, it is customary to construct climatic scenarios, which are plausible representations of future climate based on the best available information. This presentation outlines seven principles of climatic scenario development for impact studies, briefly describing some of the strengths and weaknesses of available methods and then illustrating one approach adopted in Finland
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The development of climatic scenarios for assessing impacts of climate change
International Nuclear Information System (INIS)
Carter, T.; Tuomenvirta, H.; Posch, M.
1995-01-01
There is a growing recognition that mitigation measures for limiting future global changes in climate due to the enhanced greenhouse effect are unlikely to prevent some changes from occurring. Thus, if climate changes appear to be unavoidable, there is an increased need to evaluate their likely impacts on natural systems and human activities. Most impacts of climate change need to be examined at a regional scale, and their assessment requires up-to-date information on future regional climate changes. Unfortunately, accurate predictions of regional climate are not yet available. Instead, it is customary to construct climatic scenarios, which are plausible representations of future climate based on the best available information. This presentation outlines seven principles of climatic scenario development for impact studies, briefly describing some of the strengths and weaknesses of available methods and then illustrating one approach adopted in Finland
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The development of climatic scenarios for assessing impacts of climate change
Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)
Carter, T.; Tuomenvirta, H. [Finnish Meteorological Inst., Helsinki (Finland); Posch, M. [National Inst. of Public Health and the Environment, Bilthoven (Netherlands)
1995-12-31
There is a growing recognition that mitigation measures for limiting future global changes in climate due to the enhanced greenhouse effect are unlikely to prevent some changes from occurring. Thus, if climate changes appear to be unavoidable, there is an increased need to evaluate their likely impacts on natural systems and human activities. Most impacts of climate change need to be examined at a regional scale, and their assessment requires up-to-date information on future regional climate changes. Unfortunately, accurate predictions of regional climate are not yet available. Instead, it is customary to construct climatic scenarios, which are plausible representations of future climate based on the best available information. This presentation outlines seven principles of climatic scenario development for impact studies, briefly describing some of the strengths and weaknesses of available methods and then illustrating one approach adopted in Finland
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Biotic and Climatic Velocity Identify Contrasting Areas of Vulnerability to Climate Change
Carroll, Carlos; Lawler, Joshua J.; Roberts, David R.; Hamann, Andreas
2015-01-01
Metrics that synthesize the complex effects of climate change are essential tools for mapping future threats to biodiversity and predicting which species are likely to adapt in place to new climatic conditions, disperse and establish in areas with newly suitable climate, or face the prospect of extirpation. The most commonly used of such metrics is the velocity of climate change, which estimates the speed at which species must migrate over the earth’s surface to maintain constant climatic conditions. However, “analog-based” velocities, which represent the actual distance to where analogous climates will be found in the future, may provide contrasting results to the more common form of velocity based on local climate gradients. Additionally, whereas climatic velocity reflects the exposure of organisms to climate change, resultant biotic effects are dependent on the sensitivity of individual species as reflected in part by their climatic niche width. This has motivated development of biotic velocity, a metric which uses data on projected species range shifts to estimate the velocity at which species must move to track their climatic niche. We calculated climatic and biotic velocity for the Western Hemisphere for 1961–2100, and applied the results to example ecological and conservation planning questions, to demonstrate the potential of such analog-based metrics to provide information on broad-scale patterns of exposure and sensitivity. Geographic patterns of biotic velocity for 2954 species of birds, mammals, and amphibians differed from climatic velocity in north temperate and boreal regions. However, both biotic and climatic velocities were greatest at low latitudes, implying that threats to equatorial species arise from both the future magnitude of climatic velocities and the narrow climatic tolerances of species in these regions, which currently experience low seasonal and interannual climatic variability. Biotic and climatic velocity, by approximating
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Choice of baseline climate data impacts projected species' responses to climate change.
Baker, David J; Hartley, Andrew J; Butchart, Stuart H M; Willis, Stephen G
2016-07-01
Climate data created from historic climate observations are integral to most assessments of potential climate change impacts, and frequently comprise the baseline period used to infer species-climate relationships. They are often also central to downscaling coarse resolution climate simulations from General Circulation Models (GCMs) to project future climate scenarios at ecologically relevant spatial scales. Uncertainty in these baseline data can be large, particularly where weather observations are sparse and climate dynamics are complex (e.g. over mountainous or coastal regions). Yet, importantly, this uncertainty is almost universally overlooked when assessing potential responses of species to climate change. Here, we assessed the importance of historic baseline climate uncertainty for projections of species' responses to future climate change. We built species distribution models (SDMs) for 895 African bird species of conservation concern, using six different climate baselines. We projected these models to two future periods (2040-2069, 2070-2099), using downscaled climate projections, and calculated species turnover and changes in species-specific climate suitability. We found that the choice of baseline climate data constituted an important source of uncertainty in projections of both species turnover and species-specific climate suitability, often comparable with, or more important than, uncertainty arising from the choice of GCM. Importantly, the relative contribution of these factors to projection uncertainty varied spatially. Moreover, when projecting SDMs to sites of biodiversity importance (Important Bird and Biodiversity Areas), these uncertainties altered site-level impacts, which could affect conservation prioritization. Our results highlight that projections of species' responses to climate change are sensitive to uncertainty in the baseline climatology. We recommend that this should be considered routinely in such analyses. © 2016 John Wiley
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The social construct of climate and climate change
International Nuclear Information System (INIS)
Stehr, N.
1994-01-01
Different time scales of climate change and their differential perception in society are discussed. A historical examination of natural climate changes during the past millennium suggests that short-term changes, especially crucial changes, trigger a significant response in and by society. Short-term changes correspond to the 'time horizon of everyday life', that is, to a time scale from days and weeks to a few years. The anticipated anthropogenic climate changes, however, are expected to occur on a longer time scale. They require a response by society not on the basis of primary experience but on the basis of scientifically constructed scenarios and ways in which such information is represented in the modern media for example. Socio-economic impact research relies on concepts that are based on the premise of perfectly informed actors for the development of optimal adaptation strategies. In contrast to such a conception, we develop the concept of a 'social construct of climate' as decisive for the public perception of scientific knowledge about climate and for public policy on climate change. The concept is illustrated using a number of examples. (orig.)
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Climate Prediction Center - Monitoring and Data - Regional Climate Maps:
National Weather Service NWS logo - Click to go to the NWS home page Climate Prediction Center Home Site government Web resources and services. HOME > Monitoring and Data > U.S. Climate Data > ; Precipitation & Temperature > Regional Climate Maps: USA Menu Weekly 1-Month 3-Month 12-Month Weekly
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Climate programs update: USDA Southwest Regional Climate Hub update
PROGRAM OVERVIEW: The overarching goal of the USDA SW Climate Hub is to assist farmers, ranchers and foresters in addressing the effects of climate change including prolonged drought, increased insect outbreaks and severe wildfires. In the first year of operations, the SW Climate Hub (est. Februa...
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The Climate Services Partnership (CSP): Working Together to Improve Climate Services Worldwide
Zebiak, S.; Brasseur, G.; Members of the CSP Coordinating Group
2012-04-01
Throughout the world, climate services are required to address urgent needs for climate-informed decision-making, policy and planning. These needs were explored in detail at the first International Conference on Climate Services (ICCS), held in New York in October 2011. After lengthy discussions of needs and capabilities, the conference culminated in the creation of the Climate Services Partnership (CSP). The CSP is an informal interdisciplinary network of climate information users, providers, donors and researchers interested in improving the provision and development of climate services worldwide. Members of the Climate Services Partnership work together to share knowledge, accelerate learning, develop new capacities, and establish good practices. These collaborative efforts will inform and support the evolution and implementation of the Global Framework for Climate Services. The Climate Services Partnership focuses its efforts on three levels. These include: 1. encouraging and sustaining connections between climate information providers, users, donors, and researchers 2. gathering, synthesizing and disseminating current knowledge on climate services by way of an online knowledge management platform 3. generating new knowledge on critical topics in climate service development and provision, through the creation of focused working groups on specific topics To date, the Climate Services Partnership has made progress on all three fronts. Connections have been fostered through outreach at major international conferences and professional societies. The CSP also maintains a website and a monthly newsletter, which serves as a resource for those interested in climate services. The second International Conference on Climate Services (ICCS2) will be held in Berlin in September. The CSP has also created a knowledge capture system that gathers and disseminates a wide range of information related to the development and provision of climate services. This includes an online
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International Nuclear Information System (INIS)
James Houseworth
2001-01-01
This Analysis/Model Report (AMR) documents an analysis that was performed to estimate climatic variables for the next 10,000 years by forecasting the timing and nature of climate change at Yucca Mountain (YM), Nevada (Figure 1), the site of a potential repository for high-level radioactive waste. The future-climate estimates are based on an analysis of past-climate data from analog meteorological stations, and this AMR provides the rationale for the selection of these analog stations. The stations selected provide an upper and a lower climate bound for each future climate, and the data from those sites will provide input to the infiltration model (USGS 2000) and for the total system performance assessment for the Site Recommendation (TSPA-SR) at YM. Forecasting long-term future climates, especially for the next 10,000 years, is highly speculative and rarely attempted. A very limited literature exists concerning the subject, largely from the British radioactive waste disposal effort. The discussion presented here is one method, among many, of establishing upper and lower bounds for future climate estimates. The method used here involves selecting a particular past climate from many past climates, as an analog for future climate. Other studies might develop a different rationale or select other past climates resulting in a different future climate analog. Revision 00 of this AMR was prepared in accordance with the ''Work Direction and Planning Document for Future Climate Analysis'' (Peterman 1999) under Interagency Agreement DE-AI08-97NV12033 with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). The planning document for the technical scope, content, and management of ICN 01 of this AMR is the ''Technical Work Plan for Unsaturated Zone (UZ) Flow and Transport Process Model Report'' (BSC 2001a). The scope for the TBV resolution actions in this ICN is described in the ''Technical Work Plan for: Integrated Management of Technical Product Input Department''. (BSC 2001b, Addendum B
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Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)
James Houseworth
2001-10-12
This Analysis/Model Report (AMR) documents an analysis that was performed to estimate climatic variables for the next 10,000 years by forecasting the timing and nature of climate change at Yucca Mountain (YM), Nevada (Figure 1), the site of a potential repository for high-level radioactive waste. The future-climate estimates are based on an analysis of past-climate data from analog meteorological stations, and this AMR provides the rationale for the selection of these analog stations. The stations selected provide an upper and a lower climate bound for each future climate, and the data from those sites will provide input to the infiltration model (USGS 2000) and for the total system performance assessment for the Site Recommendation (TSPA-SR) at YM. Forecasting long-term future climates, especially for the next 10,000 years, is highly speculative and rarely attempted. A very limited literature exists concerning the subject, largely from the British radioactive waste disposal effort. The discussion presented here is one method, among many, of establishing upper and lower bounds for future climate estimates. The method used here involves selecting a particular past climate from many past climates, as an analog for future climate. Other studies might develop a different rationale or select other past climates resulting in a different future climate analog. Revision 00 of this AMR was prepared in accordance with the ''Work Direction and Planning Document for Future Climate Analysis'' (Peterman 1999) under Interagency Agreement DE-AI08-97NV12033 with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). The planning document for the technical scope, content, and management of ICN 01 of this AMR is the ''Technical Work Plan for Unsaturated Zone (UZ) Flow and Transport Process Model Report'' (BSC 2001a). The scope for the TBV resolution actions in this ICN is described in the ''Technical Work Plan for: Integrated Management of Technical
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DEFF Research Database (Denmark)
Wejs, Anja
Cities rather than national governments take the lead in acting on climate change. Several cities have voluntarily created climate change plans to prevent and prepare for the effects of climate change. In the literature climate change has been examined as a multilevel governance area taking place...... around international networks. Despite the many initiatives taken by cities, existing research shows that the implementation of climate change actions is lacking. The reasons for this scarcity in practice are limited to general explanations in the literature, and studies focused on explaining...... the constraints on climate change planning at the local level are absent. To understand these constraints, this PhD thesis investigates the institutional dynamics that influence the process of the integration of climate change into planning practices at the local level in Denmark. The examination of integration...
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International Nuclear Information System (INIS)
Cambell, C. G.
2004-01-01
This report documents an analysis that was performed to estimate climatic variables for the next 10,000 years by forecasting the timing and nature of climate change at Yucca Mountain, Nevada, the site of a repository for spent nuclear fuel and high-level radioactive waste. The future-climate estimates are based on an analysis of past-climate data from analog meteorological stations, and this report provides the rationale for the selection of these analog stations. The stations selected provide an upper and a lower climate bound for each future climate, and the data from those sites will provide input to the following reports: ''Simulation of Net Infiltration for Present-Day and Potential Future Climates'' (BSC 2004 [DIRS 170007]), ''Total System Performance Assessment (TSPA) Model/Analysis for the License Application'' (BSC 2004 [DIRS 168504]), ''Features, Events, and Processes in UZ Flow and Transport'' (BSC 2004 [DIRS 170012]), and ''Features, Events, and Processes in SZ Flow and Transport'' (BSC 2004 [DIRS 170013]). Forecasting long-term future climates, especially for the next 10,000 years, is highly speculative and rarely attempted. A very limited literature exists concerning the subject, largely from the British radioactive waste disposal effort. The discussion presented here is one available forecasting method for establishing upper and lower bounds for future climate estimates. The selection of different methods is directly dependent on the available evidence used to build a forecasting argument. The method used here involves selecting a particular past climate from many past climates, as an analog for future climate. While alternative analyses are possible for the case presented for Yucca Mountain, the evidence (data) used would be the same and the conclusions would not be expected to drastically change. Other studies might develop a different rationale or select other past climates resulting in a different future climate analog. Other alternative
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The Data Platform for Climate Research and Action: Introducing Climate Watch
Hennig, R. J.; Ge, M.; Friedrich, J.; Lebling, K.; Carlock, G.; Arcipowska, A.; Mangan, E.; Biru, H.; Tankou, A.; Chaudhury, M.
2017-12-01
The Paris Agreement, adopted through Decision 1/CP.21, brings all nations together to take on ambitious efforts to combat climate change. Open access to climate data supporting climate research, advancing knowledge, and informing decision making is key to encourage and strengthen efforts of stakeholders at all levels to address and respond to effects of climate change. Climate Watch is a robust online data platform developed in response to the urgent needs of knowledge and tools to empower climate research and action, including those of researchers, policy makers, the private sector, civil society, and all other non-state actors. Building on the rapid growing technology of open data and information sharing, Climate Watch is equipped with extensive amount of climate data, informative visualizations, concise yet efficient user interface, and connection to resources users need to gather insightful information on national and global progress towards delivering on the objective of the Convention and the Paris Agreement. Climate Watch brings together hundreds of quantitative and qualitative indicators for easy explore, visualize, compare, download at global, national, and sectoral levels: Greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions for more than 190 countries over the1850-2014 time period, covering all seven Kyoto Gases following IPCC source/sink categories; Structured information on over 150 NDCs facilitating the clarity, understanding and transparency of countries' contributions to address climate change; Over 6500 identified linkages between climate actions in NDCs across the 169 targets of the sustainable development goals (SDG); Over 200 indicators describing low carbon pathways from models and scenarios by integrated assessment models (IAMs) and national sources; and Data on vulnerability and risk, policies, finance, and many more. Climate Watch platform is developed as part of the broader efforts within the World Resources Institute, the NDC Partnership, and in collaboration
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Managing Climate Change Refugia for Climate Adaptation
The concept of refugia has long been studied from theoretical and paleontological perspectives to understand how populations persisted during past periods of unfavorable climate. Recently, researchers have applied the idea to contemporary landscapes to identify climate change ref...
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Ackerman, S. A.; Mooney, M. E.
2011-12-01
The Climate Literacy Ambassadors program is a collaborative effort to advance climate literacy led by the Cooperative Institute of Meteorological Satellite Studies (CIMSS) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. With support from NASA, CIMSS is coordinating a three-tiered program to train G6-12 teachers to be Ambassadors of Climate Literacy in their schools and communities. The complete training involves participation at a teacher workshop combined with web-based professional development content around Global and Regional Climate Change. The on-line course utilizes e-learning technology to clarify graphs and concepts from the 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Summary for Policy Makers with content intricately linked to the Climate Literacy: The Essential Principles of Climate Science. Educators who take the course for credit can develop lesson plans or opt for a project of their choosing. This session will showcase select lesson plans and projects, ranging from a district-wide action plan that engaged dozens of teachers to Ambassadors volunteering at the Aldo Leopold Climate Change Nature Center to a teacher who tested a GLOBE Student Climate Research Campaign (SCRC) learning project with plans to participate in the SCRC program. Along with sharing successes from the CIMSS Climate Literacy Ambassadors project, we will share lessons learned related to the challenges of sustaining on-line virtual educator communities.
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Violence Prevention and School Climate Reform. School Climate Brief, Number 5
Nader, Kathleen
2012-01-01
Research has demonstrated that a positive school climate is an essential part of violence prevention. Many factors influence the association between school climate and behavioral outcomes. Positive school climate alone cannot prevent all variables that may contribute to the expression of aggression. Nevertheless, positive school climates influence…
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Efficient climate policies under technology and climate uncertainty
International Nuclear Information System (INIS)
Held, Hermann; Kriegler, Elmar; Lessmann, Kai; Edenhofer, Ottmar
2009-01-01
This article explores efficient climate policies in terms of investment streams into fossil and renewable energy technologies. The investment decisions maximise social welfare while observing a probabilistic guardrail for global mean temperature rise under uncertain technology and climate parameters. Such a guardrail constitutes a chance constraint, and the resulting optimisation problem is an instance of chance constrained programming, not stochastic programming as often employed. Our analysis of a model of economic growth and endogenous technological change, MIND, suggests that stringent mitigation strategies cannot guarantee a very high probability of limiting warming to 2 o C since preindustrial time under current uncertainty about climate sensitivity and climate response time scale. Achieving the 2 o C temperature target with a probability P* of 75% requires drastic carbon dioxide emission cuts. This holds true even though we have assumed an aggressive mitigation policy on other greenhouse gases from, e.g., the agricultural sector. The emission cuts are deeper than estimated from a deterministic calculation with climate sensitivity fixed at the P* quantile of its marginal probability distribution (3.6 o C). We show that earlier and cumulatively larger investments into the renewable sector are triggered by including uncertainty in the technology and climate response time scale parameters. This comes at an additional GWP loss of 0.3%, resulting in a total loss of 0.8% GWP for observing the chance constraint. We obtained those results with a new numerical scheme to implement constrained welfare optimisation under uncertainty as a chance constrained programming problem in standard optimisation software such as GAMS. The scheme is able to incorporate multivariate non-factorial probability measures such as given by the joint distribution of climate sensitivity and response time. We demonstrate the scheme for the case of a four-dimensional parameter space capturing
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Eye tracking and climate change: How is climate literacy information processed?
Williams, C. C.; McNeal, K. S.
2011-12-01
The population of the Southeastern United States is perceived to be resistant to information regarding global climate change. The Climate Literacy Partnership in the Southeast (CLiPSE) project was formed to provide a resource for climate science information. As part of this project, we are evaluating the way that education materials influence the interpretation of climate change related information. At Mississippi State University, a study is being conducted examining how individuals from the Southeastern United States process climate change information and whether or not the interaction with such information impacts the interpretation of subsequent climate change related information. By observing the patterns both before and after an educational intervention, we are able to evaluate the effectiveness of the climate change information on an individual's interpretation of related information. Participants in this study view figures describing various types of climate change related information (CO2 emissions, sea levels, etc.) while their eye movements are tracked to determine a baseline for the way that they process this type of graphical data. Specifically, we are examining time spent viewing and number of fixations on critical portions of the figures prior to exposure to an educational document on climate change. Following the baseline period, we provide participants with portions of a computerized version of Climate Literacy: The Essential Principles of Climate Sciences that the participants read at their own pace while their eye movements are monitored. Participants are told that they will be given a test on the material after reading the resource. After reading the excerpt, participants are presented with a new set of climate change related figures to interpret (with eye tracking) along with a series of questions regarding information contained in the resource. We plan to evaluate changes that occur in the way that climate change related information is
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Irimia, Liviu Mihai; Patriche, Cristian Valeriu; Quenol, Hervé; Sfîcă, Lucian; Foss, Chris
2018-02-01
Climate change is causing important shifts in the suitability of regions for wine production. Fine scale mapping of these shifts helps us to understand the evolution of vineyard climates, and to find solutions through viticultural adaptation. The aim of this study is to identify and map the structural and spatial shifts that occurred in the climatic suitability for wine production of the Cotnari wine growing region (Romania) between 1961 and 2013. Discontinuities in trends of temperature were identified, and the averages and trends of 13 climatic parameters for the 1961 to 1980 and 1981 to 2013 time periods were analysed. Using the averages of these climatic parameters, climate suitability for wine production was calculated at a resolution of 30 m and mapped for each time period, and the changes analysed. The results indicate shifts in the area's historic climatic profile, due to an increase of heliothermal resources and precipitation constancy. The area's climate suitability for wine production was modified by the loss of climate suitability for white table wines, sparkling wines and wine for distillates; shifts in suitability to higher altitudes by about 67 m, and a 48.6% decrease in the area suitable for quality white wines; and the occurrence of suitable climates for red wines at lower altitudes. The study showed that climate suitability for wine production has a multi-level spatial structure, with classes requiring a cooler climate being located at a higher altitude than those requiring a warmer climate. Climate change has therefore resulted in the shift of climate suitability classes for wine production to higher altitudes.
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Climate Change or Climate Variability? History, Science and Politics in the Mesoamerican Climate
Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)
Daniel Poleo
2016-08-01
Full Text Available Climate variations in Mesoamerica have influenced the development and decay of populations from the earliest human settlements. The present time is no exception; there is no evidence that global warming will impact rainfall in the region, but rather there are important studies showing a response of rainfall to climate variability in the American tropics. Since our tropical region is vulnerable to climate variability, public policies must be congruent to avoid the mistakes of previous generations and achieve, with the help of science, a real progress in the fight against global warming.
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Climate diplomacy. The stakes of a climate international regime
International Nuclear Information System (INIS)
Maljean-Dubois, Sandrine; Wemaere, Matthieu
2010-01-01
Written in 2010, just after the Copenhagen summit, by a specialist of international law on environment and an environment scientist, this book explores the avenues of the climate diplomacy (from Kyoto to Copenhagen) to meet the challenges of global climatic change, explains the implications of present and future negotiations, and discusses the prospects for an environmental international governance as the Rio+20 summit is approaching. The titles of the four chapters of this book are: the climate international regime, a step by step construction; guidelines and implementation of the Kyoto protocol; Post-2012 negotiations; European Union's strategy and policy against climatic change (quotas, emission trading, etc.). As a conclusion, the authors ask the question about the evolution of the climate international approach, pointing the kickback encountered at Copenhagen: now, what will come after?
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Climate change. Climate in Medieval time.
Bradley, Raymond S; Hughes, Malcolm K; Diaz, Henry F
2003-10-17
Many papers have referred to a "Medieval Warm Period." But how well defined is climate in this period, and was it as warm as or warmer than it is today? In their Perspective, Bradley et al. review the evidence and conclude that although the High Medieval (1100 to 1200 A.D.) was warmer than subsequent centuries, it was not warmer than the late 20th century. Moreover, the warmest Medieval temperatures were not synchronous around the globe. Large changes in precipitation patterns are a particular characteristic of "High Medieval" time. The underlying mechanisms for such changes must be elucidated further to inform the ongoing debate on natural climate variability and anthropogenic climate change.
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Climate Prediction Center - Outlooks
Weather Service NWS logo - Click to go to the NWS home page Climate Prediction Center Home Site Map News Web resources and services. HOME > Outreach > Publications > Climate Diagnostics Bulletin Climate Diagnostics Bulletin - Tropics Climate Diagnostics Bulletin - Forecast Climate Diagnostics
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Deriving user-informed climate information from climate model ensemble results
Huebener, Heike; Hoffmann, Peter; Keuler, Klaus; Pfeifer, Susanne; Ramthun, Hans; Spekat, Arne; Steger, Christian; Warrach-Sagi, Kirsten
2017-07-01
Communication between providers and users of climate model simulation results still needs to be improved. In the German regional climate modeling project ReKliEs-De a midterm user workshop was conducted to allow the intended users of the project results to assess the preliminary results and to streamline the final project results to their needs. The user feedback highlighted, in particular, the still considerable gap between climate research output and user-tailored input for climate impact research. Two major requests from the user community addressed the selection of sub-ensembles and some condensed, easy to understand information on the strengths and weaknesses of the climate models involved in the project.
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Climate Change, Climate Justice, and Environmental Health: Implications for the Nursing Profession.
Nicholas, Patrice K; Breakey, Suellen
2017-11-01
Climate change is an emerging challenge linked to negative outcomes for the environment and human health. Since the 1960s, there has been a growing recognition of the need to address climate change and the impact of greenhouse gas emissions implicated in the warming of our planet. There are also deleterious health outcomes linked to complex climate changes that are emerging in the 21st century. This article addresses the social justice issues associated with climate change and human health and discussion of climate justice. Discussion paper. A literature search of electronic databases was conducted for articles, texts, and documents related to climate change, climate justice, and human health. The literature suggests that those who contribute least to global warming are those who will disproportionately be affected by the negative health outcomes of climate change. The concept of climate justice and the role of the Mary Robinson Foundation-Climate Justice are discussed within a framework of nursing's professional responsibility and the importance of social justice for the world's people. The nursing profession must take a leadership role in engaging in policy and advocacy discussions in addressing the looming problems associated with climate change. Nursing organizations have adopted resolutions and engaged in leadership roles to address climate change at the local, regional, national, and global level. It is essential that nurses embrace concepts related to social justice and engage in the policy debate regarding the deleterious effects on human health related to global warming and climate change. Nursing's commitment to social justice offers an opportunity to offer significant global leadership in addressing the health implications related to climate change. Recognizing the negative impacts of climate change on well-being and the underlying socioeconomic reasons for their disproportionate and inequitable distribution can expand and optimize the profession's role
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Climatic history - answers on the variability of weather and climate?
International Nuclear Information System (INIS)
Glaser, R.; Hagedorn, H.
1994-01-01
The paper is concerned with various aspects of climatic history. Emphasis is on the spectrum of data and methods used in historical climatology. The following section is devoted to an outline of the short- and long-range climatic changes since 1500 A.D. that show how much the climate has varied in space and time. It is pointed out that climatic extremes have been an ever-recurrent phenomenon throughout history. (orig.) [de
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Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)
C. G. Cambell
2004-09-03
This report documents an analysis that was performed to estimate climatic variables for the next 10,000 years by forecasting the timing and nature of climate change at Yucca Mountain, Nevada, the site of a repository for spent nuclear fuel and high-level radioactive waste. The future-climate estimates are based on an analysis of past-climate data from analog meteorological stations, and this report provides the rationale for the selection of these analog stations. The stations selected provide an upper and a lower climate bound for each future climate, and the data from those sites will provide input to the following reports: ''Simulation of Net Infiltration for Present-Day and Potential Future Climates'' (BSC 2004 [DIRS 170007]), ''Total System Performance Assessment (TSPA) Model/Analysis for the License Application'' (BSC 2004 [DIRS 168504]), ''Features, Events, and Processes in UZ Flow and Transport'' (BSC 2004 [DIRS 170012]), and ''Features, Events, and Processes in SZ Flow and Transport'' (BSC 2004 [DIRS 170013]). Forecasting long-term future climates, especially for the next 10,000 years, is highly speculative and rarely attempted. A very limited literature exists concerning the subject, largely from the British radioactive waste disposal effort. The discussion presented here is one available forecasting method for establishing upper and lower bounds for future climate estimates. The selection of different methods is directly dependent on the available evidence used to build a forecasting argument. The method used here involves selecting a particular past climate from many past climates, as an analog for future climate. While alternative analyses are possible for the case presented for Yucca Mountain, the evidence (data) used would be the same and the conclusions would not be expected to drastically change. Other studies might develop a different rationale or select other past
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Wildland fire emissions, carbon, and climate: Wildfire–climate interactions
Yongqiang Liu; Scott Goodrick; Warren Heilman
2014-01-01
Increasing wildfire activity in recent decades, partially related to extended droughts, along with concern over potential impacts of future climate change on fire activity has resulted in increased attention on fireâclimate interactions. Findings from studies published in recent years have remarkably increased our understanding of fireâclimate interactions and improved...
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Shea, E.
2008-12-01
The demand for sector-based climate information is rapidly expanding. In order to support this demand, it is crucial that climate information is managed in an effective, efficient, and user-conscious manner. NOAA's National Climatic Data Center is working closely with numerous partners to develop a comprehensive interface that is authoritative, accessible, and responsive to a variety of sectors, stakeholders, and other users. This talk will explore these dynamics and activities, with additional perspectives on climate services derived from the regional and global experiences of the NOAA Integrated Data and Environmental Applications (IDEA) Center in the Pacific. The author will explore the importance of engaging partners and customers in the development, implementation and emergence of a national climate service program. The presentation will draw on the author's experience in climate science and risk management programs in the Pacific, development of regional and national climate services programs and insights emerging from climate services development efforts in NCDC. In this context, the author will briefly discuss some of guiding principles for effective climate services and applications including: - Early and continuous dialogue, partnership and collaboration with users/customers; - Establishing and sustaining trust and credibility through a program of shared learning and joint problem- solving; - Understanding the societal context for climate risk management and using a problem-focused approach to the development of products and services; - Addressing information needs along a continuum of timescales from extreme events to long-term change; and - Embedding education, outreach and communications activities as critical program elements in effective climate services. By way of examples, the author will reference lessons learned from: early Pacific Island climate forecast applications and climate assessment activities; the implementation of the Pacific Climate
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Knowing climate change, embodying climate praxis: experiential knowledge in southern Appalachia
Jennifer L. Rice; Brian J. Burke; Nik Heynen
2015-01-01
Whether used to support or impede action, scientific knowledge is now, more than ever, the primary framework for political discourse on climate change. As a consequence, science has become a hegemonic way of knowing climate change by mainstream climate politics, which not only limits the actors and actions deemed legitimate in climate politics but also silences...
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Youth Climate Summits: Empowering & Engaging Youth to Lead on Climate Change
Kretser, J.
2017-12-01
The Wild Center's Youth Climate Summits is a program that engages youth in climate literacy from knowledge and understanding to developing action in their schools and communities. Each Youth Climate Summit is a one to three day event that brings students and teachers together to learn about climate change science, impacts and solutions at a global and local level. Through speakers, workshops and activities, the Summit culminates in a student-driven Climate Action Plan that can be brought back to schools and communities. The summits have been found to be powerful vehicles for inspiration, learning, community engagement and youth leadership development. Climate literacy with a focus on local climate impacts and solutions is a key component of the Youth Climate Summit. The project-based learning surrounding the creation of a unique, student driven, sustainability and Climate Action Plan promotes leadership skills applicable and the tools necessary for a 21st Century workforce. Student driven projects range from school gardens and school energy audits to working with NYS officials to commit to going 100% renewable electricty at the three state-owned downhill ski facilities. The summit model has been scaled and replicated in other communities in New York State, Vermont, Ohio, Michigan and Washington states as well as internationally in Finland, Germany and Sri Lanka.
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Challenges of coordinating global climate observations - Role of satellites in climate monitoring
Richter, C.
2017-12-01
Global observation of the Earth's atmosphere, ocean and land is essential for identifying climate variability and change, and for understanding their causes. Observation also provides data that are fundamental for evaluating, refining and initializing the models that predict how the climate system will vary over the months and seasons ahead, and that project how climate will change in the longer term under different assumptions concerning greenhouse gas emissions and other human influences. Long-term observational records have enabled the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to deliver the message that warming of the global climate system is unequivocal. As the Earth's climate enters a new era, in which it is forced by human activities, as well as natural processes, it is critically important to sustain an observing system capable of detecting and documenting global climate variability and change over long periods of time. High-quality climate observations are required to assess the present state of the ocean, cryosphere, atmosphere and land and place them in context with the past. The global observing system for climate is not a single, centrally managed observing system. Rather, it is a composite "system of systems" comprising a set of climate-relevant observing, data-management, product-generation and data-distribution systems. Data from satellites underpin many of the Essential Climate Variables(ECVs), and their historic and contemporary archives are a key part of the global climate observing system. In general, the ECVs will be provided in the form of climate data records that are created by processing and archiving time series of satellite and in situ measurements. Early satellite data records are very valuable because they provide unique observations in many regions which were not otherwise observed during the 1970s and which can be assimilated in atmospheric reanalyses and so extend the satellite climate data records back in time.
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International Nuclear Information System (INIS)
Lamarre, D.; Favier, R.; Bourg, D.; Marchand, J.P.
2005-04-01
The climatic risks are analyzed in this book under the cross-vision of specialists of different domains: philosophy, sociology, economic history, law, geography, climatology and hydrology. The prevention of risks and the precautionary principle are presented first. Then, the relations between climatic risk and geography are analyzed using the notion of territoriality. The territory aspect is in the core of the present day debates about the geography of risks, in particular when the links between climate change and public health are considered. Then the main climatic risks are presented. Droughts and floods are the most damaging ones and the difficulties of prevention-indemnification coupling remain important. (J.S.)
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ClimateSpark: An in-memory distributed computing framework for big climate data analytics
Hu, Fei; Yang, Chaowei; Schnase, John L.; Duffy, Daniel Q.; Xu, Mengchao; Bowen, Michael K.; Lee, Tsengdar; Song, Weiwei
2018-06-01
The unprecedented growth of climate data creates new opportunities for climate studies, and yet big climate data pose a grand challenge to climatologists to efficiently manage and analyze big data. The complexity of climate data content and analytical algorithms increases the difficulty of implementing algorithms on high performance computing systems. This paper proposes an in-memory, distributed computing framework, ClimateSpark, to facilitate complex big data analytics and time-consuming computational tasks. Chunking data structure improves parallel I/O efficiency, while a spatiotemporal index is built for the chunks to avoid unnecessary data reading and preprocessing. An integrated, multi-dimensional, array-based data model (ClimateRDD) and ETL operations are developed to address big climate data variety by integrating the processing components of the climate data lifecycle. ClimateSpark utilizes Spark SQL and Apache Zeppelin to develop a web portal to facilitate the interaction among climatologists, climate data, analytic operations and computing resources (e.g., using SQL query and Scala/Python notebook). Experimental results show that ClimateSpark conducts different spatiotemporal data queries/analytics with high efficiency and data locality. ClimateSpark is easily adaptable to other big multiple-dimensional, array-based datasets in various geoscience domains.
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America's Climate Choices: Informing an Effective Response to Climate Change (Invited)
Liverman, D. M.; McConnell, M. C.; Raven, P.
2010-12-01
At the request of Congress, the National Academy of Sciences convened a series of coordinated activities to provide advice on actions and strategies that the nation can take to respond to climate change. As part of this suite of activities, this study examines information needs and recommends ways the federal government can better inform responses by enhancing climate change and greenhouse gas information and reporting systems and by improving climate communication and education. Demand for better information to support climate-related decisions has grown rapidly as people, organizations, and governments have moved ahead with plans and actions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and to adapt to the impacts of climate change. To meet this demand, good information systems and services are needed. Without such systems, decision makers cannot evaluate whether particular policies and actions are achieving their goals or should be modified. Although the many non-federal efforts to reduce emissions and/or adapt to future climate changes carry considerable potential to reduce risks related to climate change, there is currently no comprehensive way to assess the effectiveness of those efforts. In addition, the diverse climate change responses to date have resulted in a patchwork of regional, state, and local policies that has prompted many state and business leaders to call for the development of a more predictable and coherent policy environment at the federal level. This report demonstrates that the nation lacks comprehensive, robust, and credible information and reporting systems to inform climate choices and evaluate their effectiveness. This report also argues that decision makers can benefit from a systematic and iterative framework for responding to climate change, in which decisions and policies can be revised in light of new information and experience and that improved information and reporting systems allow for ongoing evaluation of responses to climate risks. The
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Modeling the effect of climate change on the indoor climate
Schijndel, van A.W.M.; Schellen, H.L.
2010-01-01
Within the new EU project ‘Climate for Culture’ researchers are investigating climate change impacts on UNESCO World Heritage Sites. Simulation results are expected to give information on the possible impact of climate change on the built cultural heritage and its indoor environment. This paper
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Climate forcings and climate sensitivities diagnosed from atmospheric global circulation models
Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)
Anderson, Bruce T. [Boston University, Department of Geography and Environment, Boston, MA (United States); Knight, Jeff R.; Ringer, Mark A. [Met Office Hadley Centre, Exeter (United Kingdom); Deser, Clara; Phillips, Adam S. [National Center for Atmospheric Research, Boulder, CO (United States); Yoon, Jin-Ho [University of Maryland, Cooperative Institute for Climate and Satellites, Earth System Science Interdisciplinary Center, College Park, MD (United States); Cherchi, Annalisa [Centro Euro-Mediterraneo per i Cambiamenti Climatici, and Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia, Bologna (Italy)
2010-12-15
Understanding the historical and future response of the global climate system to anthropogenic emissions of radiatively active atmospheric constituents has become a timely and compelling concern. At present, however, there are uncertainties in: the total radiative forcing associated with changes in the chemical composition of the atmosphere; the effective forcing applied to the climate system resulting from a (temporary) reduction via ocean-heat uptake; and the strength of the climate feedbacks that subsequently modify this forcing. Here a set of analyses derived from atmospheric general circulation model simulations are used to estimate the effective and total radiative forcing of the observed climate system due to anthropogenic emissions over the last 50 years of the twentieth century. They are also used to estimate the sensitivity of the observed climate system to these emissions, as well as the expected change in global surface temperatures once the climate system returns to radiative equilibrium. Results indicate that estimates of the effective radiative forcing and total radiative forcing associated with historical anthropogenic emissions differ across models. In addition estimates of the historical sensitivity of the climate to these emissions differ across models. However, results suggest that the variations in climate sensitivity and total climate forcing are not independent, and that the two vary inversely with respect to one another. As such, expected equilibrium temperature changes, which are given by the product of the total radiative forcing and the climate sensitivity, are relatively constant between models, particularly in comparison to results in which the total radiative forcing is assumed constant. Implications of these results for projected future climate forcings and subsequent responses are also discussed. (orig.)
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Modelling pesticide leaching under climate change: parameter vs. climate input uncertainty
Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)
K. Steffens
2014-02-01
Full Text Available Assessing climate change impacts on pesticide leaching requires careful consideration of different sources of uncertainty. We investigated the uncertainty related to climate scenario input and its importance relative to parameter uncertainty of the pesticide leaching model. The pesticide fate model MACRO was calibrated against a comprehensive one-year field data set for a well-structured clay soil in south-western Sweden. We obtained an ensemble of 56 acceptable parameter sets that represented the parameter uncertainty. Nine different climate model projections of the regional climate model RCA3 were available as driven by different combinations of global climate models (GCM, greenhouse gas emission scenarios and initial states of the GCM. The future time series of weather data used to drive the MACRO model were generated by scaling a reference climate data set (1970–1999 for an important agricultural production area in south-western Sweden based on monthly change factors for 2070–2099. 30 yr simulations were performed for different combinations of pesticide properties and application seasons. Our analysis showed that both the magnitude and the direction of predicted change in pesticide leaching from present to future depended strongly on the particular climate scenario. The effect of parameter uncertainty was of major importance for simulating absolute pesticide losses, whereas the climate uncertainty was relatively more important for predictions of changes of pesticide losses from present to future. The climate uncertainty should be accounted for by applying an ensemble of different climate scenarios. The aggregated ensemble prediction based on both acceptable parameterizations and different climate scenarios has the potential to provide robust probabilistic estimates of future pesticide losses.
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International Nuclear Information System (INIS)
Anon.
1990-01-01
The different climates of the past and model simulations of future climates convincingly indicate that the continuing emissions of greenhouse gases will lead to significant global warming and to changes in precipitation and other climatic variables. The projected changes in atmospheric composition and, consequently, in climatic conditions will be unique and more rapid than at any time in the past. The developing understanding of the chemical cycles controlling atmospheric composition and of the processes and behavior controlling the climate system can provide significant guidance about how the future climate will change. This chapter first summarizes the many scientific advances described in the preceding chapters that can help one better understand and describe the climate system and the resulting agricultural and hydrological impacts of these changes in climate. The chapter then draws from this understanding to outline the prospects for future climate
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Teaching Climate Social Science and Its Practices: A Two-Pronged Approach to Climate Literacy
Shwom, R.; Isenhour, C.; McCright, A.; Robinson, J.; Jordan, R.
2014-12-01
The Essential Principles of Climate Science Literacy states that a climate-literate individual can: "understand the essential principles of Earth's climate system, assess scientifically credible information about climate change, communicate about climate and climate change in a meaningful way, and make informed and responsible decisions with regard to actions that may affect climate." We argue that further integration of the social science dimensions of climate change will advance the climate literacy goals of communication and responsible actions. The underlying rationale for this argues: 1) teaching the habits of mind and scientific practices that have synergies across the social and natural sciences can strengthen students ability to understand and assess science in general and that 2) understanding the empirical research on the social, political, and economic processes (including climate science itself) that are part of the climate system is an important step for enabling effective action and communication. For example, while climate literacy has often identified the public's faulty mental models of climate processes as a partial explanation of complacency, emerging research suggests that the public's mental models of the social world are equally or more important in leading to informed and responsible climate decisions. Building student's ability to think across the social and natural sciences by understanding "how we know what we know" through the sciences and a scientific understanding of the social world allows us to achieve climate literacy goals more systematically and completely. To enable this integration we first identify the robust social science insights for the climate science literacy principles that involve social systems. We then briefly identify significant social science contributions to climate science literacy that do not clearly fit within the seven climate literacy principles but arguably could advance climate literacy goals. We conclude
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On the statistical comparison of climate model output and climate data
International Nuclear Information System (INIS)
Solow, A.R.
1991-01-01
Some broad issues arising in the statistical comparison of the output of climate models with the corresponding climate data are reviewed. Particular attention is paid to the question of detecting climate change. The purpose of this paper is to review some statistical approaches to the comparison of the output of climate models with climate data. There are many statistical issues arising in such a comparison. The author will focus on some of the broader issues, although some specific methodological questions will arise along the way. One important potential application of the approaches discussed in this paper is the detection of climate change. Although much of the discussion will be fairly general, he will try to point out the appropriate connections to the detection question. 9 refs
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On the statistical comparison of climate model output and climate data
International Nuclear Information System (INIS)
Solow, A.R.
1990-01-01
Some broad issues arising in the statistical comparison of the output of climate models with the corresponding climate data are reviewed. Particular attention is paid to the question of detecting climate change. The purpose of this paper is to review some statistical approaches to the comparison of the output of climate models with climate data. There are many statistical issues arising in such a comparison. The author will focus on some of the broader issues, although some specific methodological questions will arise along the way. One important potential application of the approaches discussed in this paper is the detection of climate change. Although much of the discussion will be fairly general, he will try to point out the appropriate connections to the detection question
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Does the Bush Administration's climate policy mean climate protection?
International Nuclear Information System (INIS)
Blanchard, Odile; Perkaus, James F.
2004-01-01
The paper analyzes the two major components of the Bush Administration's climate policy, namely an emission intensity target and a technology strategy. The question is whether those components will generate net emission reductions that will contribute to the stabilization of the greenhouse gas concentration at a safe level in the long run. It comes out that the Bush Administration climate policy does not guarantee any meaningful contribution to climate protection. The lenient emission intensity target set by the Administration will most likely allow near term emissions to grow. In the long run, the Bush Administration places a big bet on future climate-friendly technological breakthroughs to cost-effectively compensate for the current and near term net emission increases. But the outcomes of those technological developments are uncertain in terms of emission reduction potential, cost, and timing. The way towards enhanced climate protection will most likely not come from the policies of the current Administration, but rather from the growing concern about the climate issue in Congress and at the state, corporate and civil society levels. These combined forces may raise the playing field at the federal level in the near future
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Climate Neutral Campus Key Terms and Definitions | Climate Neutral Research
Campuses | NREL Neutral Campus Key Terms and Definitions Climate Neutral Campus Key Terms and Definitions The term climate neutral evolved along with net zero and a number of other "green" and accuracy in these areas lets research campuses know exactly how close they are to climate
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Climate Change and Health: Nurses as Drivers of Climate Action
Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)
Cara Cook
2018-02-01
Full Text Available Changes to Earth’s climate are occurring globally at unprecedented rates with significant impacts to human and population health, including increased likelihood of mental health illnesses, food and water insecurity, insect-borne and heat-related illnesses, and respiratory diseases. Those in the health sector are seeing the challenges patients and community members are experiencing as a result of current and projected climate threats. Health professionals, including nurses, have an opportunity to lead the charge to significantly improve society’s response to climate change and foster the strategies needed to promote health. This article highlights the current work of the Alliance of Nurses for Healthy Environments, a national nursing organization focused solely on environmental health concerns, in inspiring and empowering nurses across the country to engage in action to reduce their climate impact, move climate solutions forward, and improve the ability of health care institutions and communities to respond to the health impacts of climate change.
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Linking models of human behaviour and climate alters projected climate change
Beckage, Brian; Gross, Louis J.; Lacasse, Katherine; Carr, Eric; Metcalf, Sara S.; Winter, Jonathan M.; Howe, Peter D.; Fefferman, Nina; Franck, Travis; Zia, Asim; Kinzig, Ann; Hoffman, Forrest M.
2018-01-01
Although not considered in climate models, perceived risk stemming from extreme climate events may induce behavioural changes that alter greenhouse gas emissions. Here, we link the C-ROADS climate model to a social model of behavioural change to examine how interactions between perceived risk and emissions behaviour influence projected climate change. Our coupled climate and social model resulted in a global temperature change ranging from 3.4-6.2 °C by 2100 compared with 4.9 °C for the C-ROADS model alone, and led to behavioural uncertainty that was of a similar magnitude to physical uncertainty (2.8 °C versus 3.5 °C). Model components with the largest influence on temperature were the functional form of response to extreme events, interaction of perceived behavioural control with perceived social norms, and behaviours leading to sustained emissions reductions. Our results suggest that policies emphasizing the appropriate attribution of extreme events to climate change and infrastructural mitigation may reduce climate change the most.
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A climate of doubts. The weight of uncertainty about climate change
International Nuclear Information System (INIS)
Alex, Bastien
2014-05-01
The author proposes a review of four publications about climate change published in 2012 and 2013. He more particularly focuses on how these publications express how climate change is perceived by the different components of our modern societies, how these perceptions have an influence on the answer to challenges related to this phenomenon, what global warming tells us about mankind ability to (re)act to this major challenge. He notices that any doubt about the reality of climate change is exploited and maintains some confusion, favours the propagation and persistence of popular misbelief such as: population of developing countries will be more impacted by effects of climate change, only rich people can afford interest in environment protection and climate preservation. He outlines that a doubting community will not act, and notices that technological advances, for example geo-engineering or climate engineering, tend to deliberately manipulate the environment to counteract the climate change due to human activity
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Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)
Arvai, J. [Environmental Science and Policy Program, and Dept. of CARRS, Michigan State University, 305 Natural Resources Building, East Lansing, MI 48824 (United States); Bridge, G. [University of Oklahoma, Norman, Oklahoma (United States); Dolsak, N. [University of Washington, Bothell (United States); Franzese, R. [University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan (United States); Koontz, T.; Luginbuhl, A.; Sohngen, B.; Thompson, A. [Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio (United States); Robbins, P. [University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona (United States); Richards, K. [Indiana University, Terre Haute, Indiana (United States); Smith Korfmacher, K. [University of Rochester, Rochester (United States); Tansey, J. [Oxford University, Oxford (United Kingdom)
2006-09-15
To date the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has concerned itself with gathering a state of the art review of the science of climate change. While significant progress has been made in enhancing our integrated understanding of the climate system and the dynamics of the social systems that produce an array of potential greenhouse gases, it is also clear from the panel's reports how far the science community is from being able to present a dynamic and synoptic view of the climate system as a whole. Clear evidence of these complexities and uncertainties inherent in the climate system is evident in efforts aimed at designing robust policy interventions. In this paper, we argue that the adaptive management framework in ecosystem management may be a useful model for guiding how the IPCC can continue to be relevant both as a scientific establishment and as a policy-relevant scientific endeavor.
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International Nuclear Information System (INIS)
Arvai, J.; Bridge, G.; Dolsak, N.; Franzese, R.; Koontz, T.; Luginbuhl, A.; Sohngen, B.; Thompson, A.; Robbins, P.; Richards, K.; Smith Korfmacher, K.; Tansey, J.
2006-01-01
To date the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has concerned itself with gathering a state of the art review of the science of climate change. While significant progress has been made in enhancing our integrated understanding of the climate system and the dynamics of the social systems that produce an array of potential greenhouse gases, it is also clear from the panel's reports how far the science community is from being able to present a dynamic and synoptic view of the climate system as a whole. Clear evidence of these complexities and uncertainties inherent in the climate system is evident in efforts aimed at designing robust policy interventions. In this paper, we argue that the adaptive management framework in ecosystem management may be a useful model for guiding how the IPCC can continue to be relevant both as a scientific establishment and as a policy-relevant scientific endeavor
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Budyko, Mikhail
1999-05-01
Climate catastrophes, which many times occurred in the geological past, caused the extinction of large or small populations of animals and plants. Changes in the terrestrial and marine biota caused by the catastrophic climate changes undoubtedly resulted in considerable fluctuations in global carbon cycle and atmospheric gas composition. Primarily, carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas contents were affected. The study of these catastrophes allows a conclusion that climate system is very sensitive to relatively small changes in climate-forcing factors (transparency of the atmosphere, changes in large glaciations, etc.). It is important to take this conclusion into account while estimating the possible consequences of now occurring anthropogenic warming caused by the increase in greenhouse gas concentration in the atmosphere.
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Climate change hotspots in the CMIP5 global climate model ensemble.
Diffenbaugh, Noah S; Giorgi, Filippo
2012-01-10
We use a statistical metric of multi-dimensional climate change to quantify the emergence of global climate change hotspots in the CMIP5 climate model ensemble. Our hotspot metric extends previous work through the inclusion of extreme seasonal temperature and precipitation, which exert critical influence on climate change impacts. The results identify areas of the Amazon, the Sahel and tropical West Africa, Indonesia, and the Tibetan Plateau as persistent regional climate change hotspots throughout the 21 st century of the RCP8.5 and RCP4.5 forcing pathways. In addition, areas of southern Africa, the Mediterranean, the Arctic, and Central America/western North America also emerge as prominent regional climate change hotspots in response to intermediate and high levels of forcing. Comparisons of different periods of the two forcing pathways suggest that the pattern of aggregate change is fairly robust to the level of global warming below approximately 2°C of global warming (relative to the late-20 th -century baseline), but not at the higher levels of global warming that occur in the late-21 st -century period of the RCP8.5 pathway, with areas of southern Africa, the Mediterranean, and the Arctic exhibiting particular intensification of relative aggregate climate change in response to high levels of forcing. Although specific impacts will clearly be shaped by the interaction of climate change with human and biological vulnerabilities, our identification of climate change hotspots can help to inform mitigation and adaptation decisions by quantifying the rate, magnitude and causes of the aggregate climate response in different parts of the world.
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Asplund, Therese
2016-07-01
While previous research into understandings of climate change has usually examined general public perceptions, this study offers an audience-specific departure point. This article analyses how Swedish farmers perceive climate change and how they jointly shape their understandings. The agricultural sector is of special interest because it both contributes to and is directly affected by climate change. Through focus group discussions with Swedish farmers, this study finds that (1) farmers relate to and understand climate change through their own experiences, (2) climate change is understood either as a natural process subject to little or no human influence or as anthropogenic and (3) various communication tools contribute to the formation of natural and anthropogenic climate change frames. The article ends by discussing frame resonance and frame clash in public understanding of climate change and by comparing potential similarities and differences in how various segments of the public make sense of climate change. © The Author(s) 2014.
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Moisan, John R.
2009-01-01
Ocean phytoplankton supply about half of the oxygen that humans utilize to sustain life. In this lecture, we will explore how phytoplankton plays a critical role in modulating the Earth's climate. These tiny organisms are the base of the Ocean's food web. They can modulate the rate at which solar heat is absorbed by the ocean, either through direct absorption or through production of highly scattering cellular coverings. They take up and help sequester carbon dioxide, a key greenhouse gas that modulated the Earth's climate. They are the source of cloud nucleation gases that are key to cloud formation/processes. They are also able to modify the nutrient budgets of the ocean through active uptake of inert atmospheric nitrogen. Climate variations have a pronounced impact on phytoplankton dynamics. Long term variations in the climate have been studied through geological interpretations on its influence on phytoplankton populations. The presentation will focus on presenting the numerous linkages that have been observed between climate and phytoplankton and further discuss how present climate change scenarios are likely to impact phytoplankton populations as well as present findings from several studies that have tried to understand how the climate might react to the feedbacks from these numerous climate-phytop|ankton linkages.
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International Nuclear Information System (INIS)
Schotterer, U.
1992-01-01
The aim of this picture-based book is to make climate change understandable to a wider public. Images tell the story, figure captions enhance the essentials. Text passages tie and highlight the story, rather than provide long explanations of complex scientific reasoning. Brief summaries at the end of each chapter review knowledge of which everybody should be aware. They are based on the scientific assessments of the 1990 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Report. The climate story is explored from six different angles: the physical system, past changes, how climate affects cultures, how people affect climate, the importance of research and how to view the future
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Climate indices of Iran under climate change
Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)
alireza kochaki
2009-06-01
Full Text Available Global warming will affect all climatic variables and particularly rainfall patterns. The purpose of present investigation was to predict climatic parameters of Iran under future climate change and to compare them with the present conditions. For this reason, UKMO General Circulation Model was used for the year 2025 and 2050. By running the model, minimum and maximum monthly temperature and also maximum monthly rainfall for the representative climate stations were calculated and finally the effects of climate change on these variables based on pre-determined scenarios was evaluated. The results showed that averaged over all stations, mean temperature increase for spring in the year 2025 and 2050 will be 3.1 and 3.9, for summer 3.8 and 4.7, for autumn 2.3 and 3 and for winter 2.0 and 2.4 ºC, respectively. This increase will be more pronounced from North to the South and from East to the West parts of the country. Mean decrease in autumn rainfall for the target years of 2025 and 2050 will be 8 and 11 percent, respectively. This decrease is negligible for summer months. Length of dry season for the years 2025 and 2050 will be increased, respectively up to 214 and 223 days due to combined effects of increased temperature and decreased rainfall.
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Climate change, climatic variation and extreme biological responses.
Palmer, Georgina; Platts, Philip J; Brereton, Tom; Chapman, Jason W; Dytham, Calvin; Fox, Richard; Pearce-Higgins, James W; Roy, David B; Hill, Jane K; Thomas, Chris D
2017-06-19
Extreme climatic events could be major drivers of biodiversity change, but it is unclear whether extreme biological changes are (i) individualistic (species- or group-specific), (ii) commonly associated with unusual climatic events and/or (iii) important determinants of long-term population trends. Using population time series for 238 widespread species (207 Lepidoptera and 31 birds) in England since 1968, we found that population 'crashes' (outliers in terms of species' year-to-year population changes) were 46% more frequent than population 'explosions'. (i) Every year, at least three species experienced extreme changes in population size, and in 41 of the 44 years considered, some species experienced population crashes while others simultaneously experienced population explosions. This suggests that, even within the same broad taxonomic groups, species are exhibiting individualistic dynamics, most probably driven by their responses to different, short-term events associated with climatic variability. (ii) Six out of 44 years showed a significant excess of species experiencing extreme population changes (5 years for Lepidoptera, 1 for birds). These 'consensus years' were associated with climatically extreme years, consistent with a link between extreme population responses and climatic variability, although not all climatically extreme years generated excess numbers of extreme population responses. (iii) Links between extreme population changes and long-term population trends were absent in Lepidoptera and modest (but significant) in birds. We conclude that extreme biological responses are individualistic, in the sense that the extreme population changes of most species are taking place in different years, and that long-term trends of widespread species have not, to date, been dominated by these extreme changes.This article is part of the themed issue 'Behavioural, ecological and evolutionary responses to extreme climatic events'. © 2017 The Authors.
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Cinematic climate change, a promising perspective on climate change communication.
Sakellari, Maria
2015-10-01
Previous research findings display that after having seen popular climate change films, people became more concerned, more motivated and more aware of climate change, but changes in behaviors were short-term. This article performs a meta-analysis of three popular climate change films, The Day after Tomorrow (2005), An Inconvenient Truth (2006), and The Age of Stupid (2009), drawing on research in social psychology, human agency, and media effect theory in order to formulate a rationale about how mass media communication shapes our everyday life experience. This article highlights the factors with which science blends in the reception of the three climate change films and expands the range of options considered in order to encourage people to engage in climate change mitigation actions. © The Author(s) 2014.
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International Nuclear Information System (INIS)
1998-10-01
Reduced emissions of climate gases at the lowest cost require international cooperation in order to ensure that the most cost-efficient measures are taken. A market for emission rights is one way of achieving this. However, creating the right conditions for such a market to operate requires an unambiguous definition of the product to be traded. In this PM, the Swedish Power Association sketches out how such a product could be defined, and how a market for the resulting unambiguously defined product could be operated internationally, in parallel with other markets for energy products. Trade in climate certificates could become a joint EU approach to achieving common results within the field of climate policy. The main features of the proposal are as follows: Electricity producers would be allowed to issue climate certificates for electricity produced without climate-affecting emissions, e.g. in wind power plants. 1 kWh of electricity produced without emissions would entitle the utility to issue a climate certificate for 1 kWh. Electricity from power stations having low emissions, e.g. modern natural gas-fired plants, would entitle the utility to issue certificates in proportion to how much lower their emissions were in comparison with those from conventional coal-fired power stations. The number of certificates would be reduced by an individual coefficient, related directly to the quantity of climate-affecting emissions from the plant concerned. They would be traded and noted on markets in the various member countries. The certificates would not be nationally restricted, but could be traded across borders. Exchanges would be authorised by national authorities, in accordance with overall EU directives. These authorised exchanges would act as certification bodies, checking that certificates had been properly issued in accordance with a corresponding volume of electricity production. Electricity and certificates could be purchased from different suppliers. The
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The interactive roles of mastery climate and performance climate in predicting intrinsic motivation.
Buch, R; Nerstad, C G L; Säfvenbom, R
2017-02-01
This study examined the interplay between perceived mastery and performance climates in predicting increased intrinsic motivation. The results of a two-wave longitudinal study comprising of 141 individuals from three military academies revealed a positive relationship between a perceived mastery climate and increased intrinsic motivation only for individuals who perceived a low performance climate. This finding suggests a positive relationship between a perceived mastery climate and increased intrinsic motivation only when combined with low perceptions of a performance climate. Hence, introducing a performance climate in addition to a mastery climate can be an undermining motivational strategy, as it attenuates the positive relationship between a mastery climate and increased intrinsic motivation. Implications for future research and practice are discussed. © 2015 John Wiley & Sons A/S. Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
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Climate project screening tool: an aid for climate change adaptation
Toni Lyn Morelli; Sharon Yeh; Nikola M. Smith; Mary Beth Hennessy; Constance I. Millar
2012-01-01
To address the impacts of climate change, land managers need techniques for incorporating adaptation into ongoing or impending projects. We present a new tool, the Climate Project Screening Tool (CPST), for integrating climate change considerations into project planning as well as for developing concrete adaptation options for land managers. We designed CPST as part of...
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Do Leadership Style, Unit Climate, and Safety Climate Contribute to Safe Medication Practices?
Farag, Amany; Tullai-McGuinness, Susan; Anthony, Mary K; Burant, Christopher
2017-01-01
This study aims at: examining if leadership style and unit climate predict safety climate; and testing the direct, indirect, and total effect of leadership style, unit climate, and safety climate on nurses' safe medication practices. The Institute of Medicine and nursing scholars propose that safety climate is a prerequisite to safety practices. However, there is limited empirical evidence about factors contributing to the development of safety climate and about the association with nurses' safe medication practices. This cross-sectional study used survey data from 246 RNs working in a Magnet® hospital. Leadership style and unit climate predicted 20% to 50% of variance on all safety climate dimensions. Model testing revealed the indirect impact of leadership style and unit climate on nurses' safe medication practices. Our hypothesized model explained small amount of the variance on nurses' safe medication practices. This finding suggests that nurses' safe medication practices are influenced by multiple contextual and personal factors that should be further examined.
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Impacts of Climate Change on Native Landcover: Seeking Future Climatic Refuges
Zanin, Marina; Mangabeira Albernaz, Ana Luisa
2016-01-01
Climate change is a driver for diverse impacts on global biodiversity. We investigated its impacts on native landcover distribution in South America, seeking to predict its effect as a new force driving habitat loss and population isolation. Moreover, we mapped potential future climatic refuges, which are likely to be key areas for biodiversity conservation under climate change scenarios. Climatically similar native landcovers were aggregated using a decision tree, generating a reclassified l...
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Evolving the US Climate Resilience Toolkit to Support a Climate-Smart Nation
Tilmes, C.; Niepold, F., III; Fox, J. F.; Herring, D.; Dahlman, L. E.; Hall, N.; Gardiner, N.
2015-12-01
Communities, businesses, resource managers, and decision-makers at all levels of government need information to understand and ameliorate climate-related risks. Likewise, climate information can expose latent opportunities. Moving from climate science to social and economic decisions raises complex questions about how to communicate the causes and impacts of climate variability and change; how to characterize and quantify vulnerabilities, risks, and opportunities faced by communities and businesses; and how to make and implement "win-win" adaptation plans at local, regional, and national scales. A broad coalition of federal agencies launched the U.S. Climate Resilience Toolkit (toolkit.climate.gov) in November 2014 to help our nation build resilience to climate-related extreme events. The site's primary audience is planners and decision makers in business, resource management, and government (at all levels) who seek science-based climate information and tools to help them in their near- and long-term planning. The Executive Office of the President assembled a task force of dozens of subject experts from across the 13 agencies of the U.S. Global Change Research Program to guide the site's development. The site's ongoing evolution is driven by feedback from the target audience. For example, based on feedback, climate projections will soon play a more prominent role in the site's "Climate Explorer" tool and case studies. The site's five-step adaptation planning process is being improved to better facilitate people getting started and to provide clear benchmarks for evaluating progress along the way. In this session, we will share lessons learned from a series of user engagements around the nation and evidence that the Toolkit couples climate information with actionable decision-making processes in ways that are helping Americans build resilience to climate-related stressors.
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Gergel, D. R.; Watts, L. H.; Salathe, E. P.; Mankowski, J. D.
2017-12-01
Climate science, already a highly interdisciplinary field, is rapidly evolving, and natural resource managers are increasingly involved in policymaking and adaptation decisions to address climate change that need to be informed by state-of-the-art climate science. Consequently, there is a strong demand for unique organizations that engender collaboration and cooperation between government, non-profit, academic and for-profit sectors that are addressing issues relating to natural resources management and climate adaptation and resilience. These organizations are often referred to as boundary organizations. The Northwest Climate Science Center (NW CSC) and the North Pacific Landscape Conservation Cooperative (NP LCC) are two such boundary organizations operating in different contexts. Together, the NW CSC and the NP LCC fulfill the need for sites of co-production between researchers and managers working on climate-related issues, and a key component of this work is a monthly climate science newsletter that includes recent climate science journal articles, reports, and climate-related events. Our study evaluates the effectiveness of the climate science digest (CSD) through a three-pronged approach: a) in-depth interviews with natural resource managers who use the CSD, b) poll questions distributed to CSD subscribers, and c) quantitative analysis of CSD effectiveness using analytics from MailChimp distribution. We aim to a) map the reach of the CSD across the Northwest and at a national level; b) understand the efficacy of the CSD at communicating climate science to diverse audiences; c) evaluate the usefulness of CSD content for diverse constituencies of subscribers; d) glean transferrable knowledge for future evaluations of boundary management tools; and e) establish a protocol for designing climate science newsletters for other agencies disseminating climate science information. We will present results from all three steps of our evaluation process and describe
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Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)
Nicolas Casajus
Full Text Available An impressive number of new climate change scenarios have recently become available to assess the ecological impacts of climate change. Among these impacts, shifts in species range analyzed with species distribution models are the most widely studied. Whereas it is widely recognized that the uncertainty in future climatic conditions must be taken into account in impact studies, many assessments of species range shifts still rely on just a few climate change scenarios, often selected arbitrarily. We describe a method to select objectively a subset of climate change scenarios among a large ensemble of available ones. Our k-means clustering approach reduces the number of climate change scenarios needed to project species distributions, while retaining the coverage of uncertainty in future climate conditions. We first show, for three biologically-relevant climatic variables, that a reduced number of six climate change scenarios generates average climatic conditions very close to those obtained from a set of 27 scenarios available before reduction. A case study on potential gains and losses of habitat by three northeastern American tree species shows that potential future species distributions projected from the selected six climate change scenarios are very similar to those obtained from the full set of 27, although with some spatial discrepancies at the edges of species distributions. In contrast, projections based on just a few climate models vary strongly according to the initial choice of climate models. We give clear guidance on how to reduce the number of climate change scenarios while retaining the central tendencies and coverage of uncertainty in future climatic conditions. This should be particularly useful during future climate change impact studies as more than twice as many climate models were reported in the fifth assessment report of IPCC compared to the previous one.
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Casajus, Nicolas; Périé, Catherine; Logan, Travis; Lambert, Marie-Claude; de Blois, Sylvie; Berteaux, Dominique
2016-01-01
An impressive number of new climate change scenarios have recently become available to assess the ecological impacts of climate change. Among these impacts, shifts in species range analyzed with species distribution models are the most widely studied. Whereas it is widely recognized that the uncertainty in future climatic conditions must be taken into account in impact studies, many assessments of species range shifts still rely on just a few climate change scenarios, often selected arbitrarily. We describe a method to select objectively a subset of climate change scenarios among a large ensemble of available ones. Our k-means clustering approach reduces the number of climate change scenarios needed to project species distributions, while retaining the coverage of uncertainty in future climate conditions. We first show, for three biologically-relevant climatic variables, that a reduced number of six climate change scenarios generates average climatic conditions very close to those obtained from a set of 27 scenarios available before reduction. A case study on potential gains and losses of habitat by three northeastern American tree species shows that potential future species distributions projected from the selected six climate change scenarios are very similar to those obtained from the full set of 27, although with some spatial discrepancies at the edges of species distributions. In contrast, projections based on just a few climate models vary strongly according to the initial choice of climate models. We give clear guidance on how to reduce the number of climate change scenarios while retaining the central tendencies and coverage of uncertainty in future climatic conditions. This should be particularly useful during future climate change impact studies as more than twice as many climate models were reported in the fifth assessment report of IPCC compared to the previous one.
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Climate Neutral Research Campuses | NREL
the background. Set an example for climate neutrality. Use NREL's climate action planning process and more. Climate Action Planning Process Identify the best technology options for a climate action plan . Climate Action Planning Tool Identify the best technology options for a climate action plan. Technology
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Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)
Rehdanz, Katrin [Centre for Marine and Climate Research, Hamburg University, Hamburg (Germany); Maddison, David [Department of Economics, University of Southern Denmark, Odense (Denmark)
2005-01-05
Climate is an important input to many human activities. Climate affects heating and cooling requirements, health, clothing and nutritional needs as well as recreational activities. As such, it is to be expected that individuals will have a preference for particular types of climate. This paper analyses a panel of 67 countries attempting to explain differences in self-reported levels of happiness by reference to, amongst other things, temperature and precipitation. Various indices are used for each of these variables, including means, extremes and the number of hot, cold, wet and dry months. Using a panel-corrected least squares approach, the paper demonstrates that, even when controlling for a range of other factors, climate variables have a highly significant effect on country-wide self-reported levels of happiness. On the basis of these results, it is determined that differential patterns of anthropogenically induced climate change might alter dramatically the distribution of happiness between nations, with some countries moving towards a preferred climate and others moving further away. We find that high-latitude countries included in our dataset might benefit from temperature changes. Countries already characterized by very high summer temperatures would most likely suffer losses from climate change.
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Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)
Knieling, Joerg [HafenCity Univ. Hamburg (Germany). Urban Planning and Regional Development; Leal Filho, Walter (eds.) [HAW Hamburg (Germany). Research and Transfer Centre Applications of Life Science
2013-07-01
Climate change is a cause for concern both globally and locally. In order for it to be tackled holistically, its governance is an important topic needing scientific and practical consideration. Climate change governance is an emerging area, and one which is closely related to state and public administrative systems and the behaviour of private actors, including the business sector, as well as the civil society and non-governmental organisations. Questions of climate change governance deal both with mitigation and adaptation whilst at the same time trying to devise effective ways of managing the consequences of these measures across the different sectors. Many books have been produced on general matters related to climate change, such as climate modelling, temperature variations, sea level rise, but, to date, very few publications have addressed the political, economic and social elements of climate change and their links with governance. This book will address this gap. Furthermore, a particular feature of this book is that it not only presents different perspectives on climate change governance, but it also introduces theoretical approaches and brings these together with practical examples which show how main principles may be implemented in practice.
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International Nuclear Information System (INIS)
Rehdanz, Katrin; Maddison, David
2005-01-01
Climate is an important input to many human activities. Climate affects heating and cooling requirements, health, clothing and nutritional needs as well as recreational activities. As such, it is to be expected that individuals will have a preference for particular types of climate. This paper analyses a panel of 67 countries attempting to explain differences in self-reported levels of happiness by reference to, amongst other things, temperature and precipitation. Various indices are used for each of these variables, including means, extremes and the number of hot, cold, wet and dry months. Using a panel-corrected least squares approach, the paper demonstrates that, even when controlling for a range of other factors, climate variables have a highly significant effect on country-wide self-reported levels of happiness. On the basis of these results, it is determined that differential patterns of anthropogenically induced climate change might alter dramatically the distribution of happiness between nations, with some countries moving towards a preferred climate and others moving further away. We find that high-latitude countries included in our dataset might benefit from temperature changes. Countries already characterized by very high summer temperatures would most likely suffer losses from climate change
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Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)
Yang, Haijun [Peking University, Department of Atmospheric Science and Laboratory for Severe Storm and Flood Disasters, School of Physics, Beijing (China); Liu, Zhengyu [University of Wisconsin-Madison, Center for Climatic Research and Department of the Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences, Madison, WI (United States)
2005-06-01
Tropical-extratropical climate interactions are studied by idealized experiments with a prescribed 2 C SST anomaly at different latitude bands in a coupled climate model. Instead of focusing on intrinsic climate variability, this work investigates the mean climate adjustment to remote external forcing. The extratropical impact on tropical climate can be as strong as the tropical impact on extratropical climate, with the remote sea surface temperature (SST) response being about half the magnitude of the imposed SST change in the forcing region. The equatorward impact of extratropical climate is accomplished by both the atmospheric bridge and the oceanic tunnel. About two-thirds of the tropical SST change comes from the atmospheric bridge, while the remaining one-third comes from the oceanic tunnel. The equatorial SST increase is first driven by the reduced latent heat flux and the weakened poleward surface Ekman transport, and then enhanced by the decrease in subtropical cells' strength and the equatorward subduction of warm anomalies. In contrast, the poleward impact of tropical climate is accomplished mainly by the atmospheric bridge, which is responsible for extratropical temperature changes in both the surface and subsurface. Sensitivity experiments also show the dominant role of the Southern Hemisphere oceans in the tropical climate change. (orig.)
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INTRODUCTION: Focus on Climate Engineering: Intentional Intervention in the Climate System
2009-12-01
Geoengineering techniques for countering climate change have been receiving much press recently as a `Plan B' if a global deal to tackle climate change is not agreed at the COP15 negotiations in Copenhagen this December. However, the field is controversial as the methods may have unforeseen consequences, potentially making temperatures rise in some regions or reducing rainfall, and many aspects remain under-researched. This focus issue of Environmental Research Letters is a collection of research articles, invited by David Keith, University of Calgary, and Ken Caldeira, Carnegie Institution, that present and evaluate different methods for engineering the Earth's climate. Not only do the letters in this issue highlight various methods of climate engineering but they also detail the arguments for and against climate engineering as a concept. Further reading Focus on Geoengineering at http://environmentalresearchweb.org/cws/subject/tag=geoengineering IOP Conference Series: Earth and Environmental Science is an open-access proceedings service available at www.iop.org/EJ/journal/ees Focus on Climate Engineering: Intentional Intervention in the Climate System Contents Modification of cirrus clouds to reduce global warming David L Mitchell and William Finnegan Climate engineering and the risk of rapid climate change Andrew Ross and H Damon Matthews Researching geoengineering: should not or could not? Martin Bunzl Of mongooses and mitigation: ecological analogues to geoengineering H Damon Matthews and Sarah E Turner Toward ethical norms and institutions for climate engineering research David R Morrow, Robert E Kopp and Michael Oppenheimer On the possible use of geoengineering to moderate specific climate change impacts Michael C MacCracken The impact of geoengineering aerosols on stratospheric temperature and ozone P Heckendorn, D Weisenstein, S Fueglistaler, B P Luo, E Rozanov, M Schraner, L W Thomason and T Peter The fate of the Greenland Ice Sheet in a geoengineered
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Climate change and climate variability: personal motivation for adaptation and mitigation.
Semenza, Jan C; Ploubidis, George B; George, Linda A
2011-05-21
Global climate change impacts on human and natural systems are predicted to be severe, far reaching, and to affect the most physically and economically vulnerable disproportionately. Society can respond to these threats through two strategies: mitigation and adaptation. Industry, commerce, and government play indispensable roles in these actions but so do individuals, if they are receptive to behavior change. We explored whether the health frame can be used as a context to motivate behavioral reductions of greenhouse gas emissions and adaptation measures. In 2008, we conducted a cross-sectional survey in the United States using random digit dialing. Personal relevance of climate change from health threats was explored with the Health Belief Model (HBM) as a conceptual frame and analyzed through logistic regressions and path analysis. Of 771 individuals surveyed, 81% (n = 622) acknowledged that climate change was occurring, and were aware of the associated ecologic and human health risks. Respondents reported reduced energy consumption if they believed climate change could affect their way of life (perceived susceptibility), Odds Ratio (OR) = 2.4 (95% Confidence Interval (CI): 1.4-4.0), endanger their life (perceived severity), OR = 1.9 (95% CI: 1.1-3.1), or saw serious barriers to protecting themselves from climate change, OR = 2.1 (95% CI: 1.2-3.5). Perceived susceptibility had the strongest effect on reduced energy consumption, either directly or indirectly via perceived severity. Those that reported having the necessary information to prepare for climate change impacts were more likely to have an emergency kit OR = 2.1 (95% CI: 1.4-3.1) or plan, OR = 2.2 (95% CI: 1.5-3.2) for their household, but also saw serious barriers to protecting themselves from climate change or climate variability, either by having an emergency kit OR = 1.6 (95% CI: 1.1-2.4) or an emergency plan OR = 1.5 (95%CI: 1.0-2.2). Motivation for voluntary mitigation is mostly dependent on
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Climate economics in progress 2011; Climate economics in progress 2011
Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)
De Perthuis, Christian [Paris-Dauphine University (France); Jouvet, Pierre-Andre [Paris-Ouest University (France); Trotignon, Raphael; Simonet, Gabriela; Boutueil, Virginie [Climate Economics Chair, Paris-Dauphine University (France)
2011-10-01
Climate Economics in Progress offers a global overview of the present status of action on climate change. Drawing on the most recent data, it analyzes the development of carbon markets in Europe and other parts of the world. It also examines the conditions for including major players such as China and new sectors such as agriculture, forestry and transport in the fight against global warming. The book is essential reading for anyone wishing to understand current advances in climate control, which could pave the way for a new form of economic growth. The book brings together a group of researchers whose goal is to make the link between academic research on the economics of climate change and the implementation of operational tools, thereby allowing the climate issue to be integrated into the functioning of the real economy
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Climate and climate-related issues for the safety assessment SR-Site
International Nuclear Information System (INIS)
2010-12-01
The purpose of this report is to document current scientific knowledge on climate and climate-related conditions, relevant to the long-term safety of a KBS-3 repository, to a level required for an adequate treatment in the safety assessment SR-Site. The report also presents a number of dedicated studies on climate and selected climate-related processes of relevance for the assessment of long term repository safety. Based on this information, the report presents a number of possible future climate developments for Forsmark, the site selected for building a repository for spent nuclear fuel in Sweden (Figure 1-1). The presented climate developments are used as basis for the selection and analysis of SR-Site safety assessment scenarios in the SR-Site main report /SKB 2011/. The present report is based on research conducted and published by SKB as well as on research reported in the general scientific literature
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Climate and climate-related issues for the safety assessment SR-Site
Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)
2010-12-15
The purpose of this report is to document current scientific knowledge on climate and climate-related conditions, relevant to the long-term safety of a KBS-3 repository, to a level required for an adequate treatment in the safety assessment SR-Site. The report also presents a number of dedicated studies on climate and selected climate-related processes of relevance for the assessment of long term repository safety. Based on this information, the report presents a number of possible future climate developments for Forsmark, the site selected for building a repository for spent nuclear fuel in Sweden (Figure 1-1). The presented climate developments are used as basis for the selection and analysis of SR-Site safety assessment scenarios in the SR-Site main report /SKB 2011/. The present report is based on research conducted and published by SKB as well as on research reported in the general scientific literature
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Climate, greenhouse effect, energy
International Nuclear Information System (INIS)
Henriksen, Thormod; Kanestroem, Ingolf
2001-01-01
The book has sections on the sun as energy source, the earth climate and it's changes and factors influencing this, the greenhouse effect on earth and other planets, greenhouse gases and aerosols and their properties and importance, historic climate and paleoclimate, climatic models and their uses and limitations, future climate, consequences of climatic changes, uncertainties regarding the climate and measures for reducing the greenhouse effect. Finally there are sections on energy and energy resources, the use, sources such as fossil fuels, nuclear power, renewable resources, heat pumps, energy storage and environmental aspects and the earth magnetic field is briefly surveyed
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... What Is Permafrost? How Do We Predict Future Climate? Green Career: Earth Scientist 10 Things About Ecosystems ... study Earth? What can trees tell us about climate change? Why does NASA care about food? Games ...
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Climate variability and climate change vulnerability and adaptation. Workshop summary
International Nuclear Information System (INIS)
Bhatti, N.; Cirillo, R.R.; Dixon, R.K.
1995-01-01
Representatives from fifteen countries met in Prague, Czech Republic, on September 11-15, 1995, to share results from the analysis of vulnerability and adaptation to global climate change. The workshop focused on the issues of global climate change and its impacts on various sectors of a national economy. The U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (FCCC), which has been signed by more than 150 governments worldwide, calls on signatory parties to develop and communicate measures they are implementing to respond to global climate change. An analysis of a country's vulnerability to changes in the climate helps it identify suitable adaptation measures. These analyses are designed to determine the extent of the impacts of global climate change on sensitive sectors such as agricultural crops, forests, grasslands and livestock, water resources, and coastal areas. Once it is determined how vulnerable a country may be to climate change, it is possible to identify adaptation measures for ameliorating some or all of the effects.The objectives of the vulnerability and adaptation workshop were to: The objectives of the vulnerability and adaptation workshop were to: Provide an opportunity for countries to describe their study results; Encourage countries to learn from the experience of the more complete assessments and adjust their studies accordingly; Identify issues and analyses that require further investigation; and Summarize results and experiences for governmental and intergovernmental organizations
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Climate variability and climate change vulnerability and adaptation. Workshop summary
Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)
Bhatti, N.; Cirillo, R.R. [Argonne National Lab., IL (United States); Dixon, R.K. [U.S. Country Studies Program, Washington, DC (United States)] [and others
1995-12-31
Representatives from fifteen countries met in Prague, Czech Republic, on September 11-15, 1995, to share results from the analysis of vulnerability and adaptation to global climate change. The workshop focused on the issues of global climate change and its impacts on various sectors of a national economy. The U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (FCCC), which has been signed by more than 150 governments worldwide, calls on signatory parties to develop and communicate measures they are implementing to respond to global climate change. An analysis of a country`s vulnerability to changes in the climate helps it identify suitable adaptation measures. These analyses are designed to determine the extent of the impacts of global climate change on sensitive sectors such as agricultural crops, forests, grasslands and livestock, water resources, and coastal areas. Once it is determined how vulnerable a country may be to climate change, it is possible to identify adaptation measures for ameliorating some or all of the effects.The objectives of the vulnerability and adaptation workshop were to: The objectives of the vulnerability and adaptation workshop were to: Provide an opportunity for countries to describe their study results; Encourage countries to learn from the experience of the more complete assessments and adjust their studies accordingly; Identify issues and analyses that require further investigation; and Summarize results and experiences for governmental and intergovernmental organizations.
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ClimateSpark: An In-memory Distributed Computing Framework for Big Climate Data Analytics
Hu, F.; Yang, C. P.; Duffy, D.; Schnase, J. L.; Li, Z.
2016-12-01
Massive array-based climate data is being generated from global surveillance systems and model simulations. They are widely used to analyze the environment problems, such as climate changes, natural hazards, and public health. However, knowing the underlying information from these big climate datasets is challenging due to both data- and computing- intensive issues in data processing and analyzing. To tackle the challenges, this paper proposes ClimateSpark, an in-memory distributed computing framework to support big climate data processing. In ClimateSpark, the spatiotemporal index is developed to enable Apache Spark to treat the array-based climate data (e.g. netCDF4, HDF4) as native formats, which are stored in Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) without any preprocessing. Based on the index, the spatiotemporal query services are provided to retrieve dataset according to a defined geospatial and temporal bounding box. The data subsets will be read out, and a data partition strategy will be applied to equally split the queried data to each computing node, and store them in memory as climateRDDs for processing. By leveraging Spark SQL and User Defined Function (UDFs), the climate data analysis operations can be conducted by the intuitive SQL language. ClimateSpark is evaluated by two use cases using the NASA Modern-Era Retrospective Analysis for Research and Applications (MERRA) climate reanalysis dataset. One use case is to conduct the spatiotemporal query and visualize the subset results in animation; the other one is to compare different climate model outputs using Taylor-diagram service. Experimental results show that ClimateSpark can significantly accelerate data query and processing, and enable the complex analysis services served in the SQL-style fashion.
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A generalized theory of sun-climate/weather link and climatic change
International Nuclear Information System (INIS)
Njau, E.C.
1988-07-01
We generalize the theory of Sun-Climate/weather links and climatic change developed earlier by the author. On the basis of this theory, we show mathematically that key climatic/weather parameters are continuously subjected to determinable amplitude modulations and other variations which may be useful in climatic prediction work. A number of new and known terrestrial oscillations in climate and atmospheric behaviour in general, including the known quasi-biennial oscillations and many others, are deduced from the theory and accounted for in terms of their causative physical processes. Finally we briefly discuss the possibility of applying the theory to the planets Mars and Venus as well as Saturn's largest satellite, Titan. (author). 30 refs, 1 fig
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Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)
NONE
1977-02-15
In spite of man's remarkable advances in technology, ultimately he is still dependent on the Earth's climatic system for food and fresh water. The recent occurrences in certain regions of the world of climatic extremes such as excessive rain or droughts and unseasonably high or low temperatures have led to speculation that a major climatic change is occurring on a global scale. Some point to the recent drop in temperatures in the northern hemisphere as an indication that the Earth is entering a new ice age. Others see a global warming trend that may be due to a build-up of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. An authoritative report on the subject has been prepared by a World Meteorological Organization Panel of Experts on Climatic Change. Excerpts from the report are given. (author)
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International Nuclear Information System (INIS)
1977-01-01
In spite of man's remarkable advances in technology, ultimately he is still dependent on the Earth's climatic system for food and fresh water. The recent occurrences in certain regions of the world of climatic extremes such as excessive rain or droughts and unseasonably high or low temperatures have led to speculation that a major climatic change is occurring on a global scale. Some point to the recent drop in temperatures in the northern hemisphere as an indication that the Earth is entering a new ice age. Others see a global warming trend that may be due to a build-up of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. An authoritative report on the subject has been prepared by a World Meteorological Organization Panel of Experts on Climatic Change. Excerpts from the report are given. (author)
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Lessons on climate sensitivity from past climate changes
von der Heydt, A.S.; Dijkstra, H.A.; van de Wal, R.S.W.; Caballero, R.; Crucifix, M.; Foster, G.L.; Huber, M.; Kohler, P.; Rohling, E.; Valdes, P.J.; Ashwin, P.; Bathiany, S.; Berends, T.; van Bree, L.G.J.; Ditlevsen, P.; Ghil, M.; Haywood, A.; Katzav, J.K.; Lohmann, G.; Lohmann, J.; Lucarini, V.; Marzocchi, A.; Palike, H.; Ruvalcaba Baroni, I.; Simon, D.; Sluijs, A.; Stap, L.B.; Tantet, A.; Viebahn, J.; Ziegler, M.
2016-01-01
Over the last decade, our understanding of climate sensitivity has improved considerably. The climate system shows variability on many timescales, is subject to non-stationary forcing and it is most likely out of equilibrium with the changes in the radiative forcing. Slow and fast feedbacks
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Weather Service NWS logo - Click to go to the NWS home page Climate Forecast System Home News Organization Web portal to all Federal, state and local government Web resources and services. The NCEP Climate when using the CFS Reanalysis (CFSR) data. Saha, Suranjana, and Coauthors, 2010: The NCEP Climate
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Thapa, Amrit
2013-01-01
School climate research is clearly evolving. The field demands rigorous and empirically sound research that focuses on relating specific aspects and activities of interventions to changes in specific components of school climate. We also need empirical evidence based on sound research techniques on how both interventions and climate affect…
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Kenya's Climate Change Action Plan. Low Carbon Climate Resilient Development Pathway
Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)
Murphy, D.; Sawyer, D.; Stiebert, S.; McFatridge, S. [International Institute for Sustainable Development IISD, Winnipeg, Manitoba (Canada); Wuertenberger, L.; Van Tilburg, X.; Hekkenberg, M. [Energy research Centre of the Netherlands ECN, Policy Studies, Amsterdam (Netherlands); Owino, T.; Battye, W. [ClimateCare, Nairobi (Kenya); Mutia, T. [Regional Institute for Social Enterprise Kenya RISE, Nairobi (Kenya); Olum, P. [Climate Change Consultant (Kenya)
2012-12-15
Kenya Vision 2030 - the long-term development blueprint for the country - aims to transform Kenya into 'a newly industrialising, middle-income country providing a high quality of life to all its citizens in a clean and secure environment'. A low carbon climate resilient development pathway, as set out in this Climate Change Action Plan, can help meet Vision 2030 goals through actions that address both sustainable development and climate change. This pathway can also help the Government achieve the Millennium Development Goals and other internationally agreed development goals without compromising the environment and its natural resources. As Kenya realizes its development aspirations, there will be gains and risks. A growing population and economy with migration to cities will mean increases in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Resulting environmental and social conditions, including increased competition over resources, could intensify vulnerability to climate risks. Transitioning to a low carbon climate resilient development pathway can address future risks thereby improving Kenya's ability to prosper under a changing climate while reducing the emissions intensity of a growing economy. Moving forward on the 2010 National Climate Change Response Strategy will help Kenya transition to a low carbon climate resilient development pathway that puts people and livelihoods at the forefront. The strategy recognized the importance of climate change and development, and this Climate Change Action Plan is the logical next step. A yearlong multistakeholder participatory process involving the public sector, private sector and civil society resulted in this Action Plan that identifies priority climate change actions for Kenya for the short, medium and long term. The Government of Kenya takes climate change and its impact on development seriously. Climate change is considered a crosscutting issue that will be mainstreamed in the planning process both at the national
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International Nuclear Information System (INIS)
Sudhakara Reddy, B.; Assenza, Gaudenz B.
2009-01-01
For over two decades, scientific and political communities have debated whether and how to act on climate change. The present paper revisits these debates and synthesizes the longstanding arguments. Firstly, it provides an overview of the development of international climate policy and discusses clashing positions, represented by sceptics and supporters of action on climate change. Secondly, it discusses the market-based measures as a means to increase the win-win opportunities and to attract profit-minded investors to invest in climate change mitigation. Finally, the paper examines whether climate protection policies can yield benefits both for the environment and the economy. A new breed of analysts are identified who are convinced of the climate change problem, while remaining sceptical of the proposed solutions. The paper suggests the integration of climate policies with those of development priorities that are vitally important for developing countries and stresses the need for using sustainable development as a framework for climate change policies.
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Lutz, Arthur F.; ter Maat, Herbert W.; Biemans, Hester; Shrestha, Arun B.; Wester, Philippus; Immerzeel, Walter W.|info:eu-repo/dai/nl/290472113
2016-01-01
Climate change impact studies depend on projections of future climate provided by climate models. The number of climate models is large and increasing, yet limitations in computational capacity make it necessary to compromise the number of climate models that can be included in a climate change
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Lutz, Arthur F.; Maat, ter Herbert W.; Biemans, Hester; Shrestha, Arun B.; Wester, Philippus; Immerzeel, Walter W.
2016-01-01
Climate change impact studies depend on projections of future climate provided by climate models. The number of climate models is large and increasing, yet limitations in computational capacity make it necessary to compromise the number of climate models that can be included in a climate change
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Future climate resources for tourism in Europe based on the daily Tourism Climatic Index
Perch-Nielsen, S.; Amelung, B.; Knutti, R.
2010-01-01
Climate is an important resource for many types of tourism. One of several metrics for the suitability of climate for sightseeing is Mieczkowski’s “Tourism Climatic Index” (TCI), which summarizes and combines seven climate variables. By means of the TCI, we analyse the present climate resources for
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International Nuclear Information System (INIS)
Parry, M.; McGlade, J.; Verschoor, M.; Isoard, S.; Anema, K.; Boer, J.; Cowan, C.; Collins, R.; Smeets, M.
2009-01-01
At the Conference of Parties in Copenhagen, Denmark, December 7-18, 2009 Change Magazine will present a special issue on 'Climate Adaptation in Europe'. The magazine contains articles on climate policy strategies in European countries and cross-border studies on climate change, articles on climate adaptation in the Alps, on water quality as a bottleneck for the agricultural sector, and drought in the mediterranean countries. How will member countries in the European Union tackle the climate crisis?.
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Niepold, F., III; Crim, H.; Fiorile, G.; Eldadah, S.
2017-12-01
Since 2012, the Climate and Energy Literacy community have realized that as cities, nations and the international community seek solutions to global climate change over the coming decades, a more comprehensive, interdisciplinary approach to climate literacy—one that includes economic and social considerations—will play a vital role in knowledgeable planning, decision-making, and governance. City, county and state leaders are now leading the American response to a changing climate by incubating social innovation to prevail in the face of unprecedented change. Cities are beginning to realize the importance of critical investments to support the policies and strategies that will foster the climate literacy necessary for citizens to understand the urgency of climate actions and to succeed in a resilient post-carbon economy and develop the related workforce. Over decade of federal and non-profit Climate Change Education effective methods have been developed that can support municipality's significant educational capabilities for the purpose of strengthening and scaling city, state, business, and education actions designed to sustain and effectively address this significant social change. Looking to foster the effective and innovative strategies that will enable their communities several networks have collaborated to identify recommendations for effective education and communication practices when working with different types of audiences. U.S. National Science Foundation funded Climate Change Education Partnership (CCEP) Alliance, the National Wildlife Federation, NOAA Climate Program Office, Tri-Agency Climate Change Education Collaborative and the Climate Literacy and Energy Awareness Network (CLEAN) are working to develop a new web portal that will highlight "effective" practices that includes the acquisition and use of climate change knowledge to inform decision-making. The purpose of the web portal is to transfer effective practice to support communities to be
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International Nuclear Information System (INIS)
Brown, P.G.
1997-01-01
A trustee is someone who cares for a resource on behalf of another. In the case of climate, one generation cares for the climate and the myriad things climate effects on behalf of subsequent generations. This article offers reasons for accepting trusteeship as a framework for thinking about climate change; discusses what trustee duties are: considers their implications for the construction of an economics of stewardship; shows how tradeoffs would be assessed within this framework, and points towards a reconceptualization of international relations based on these ideas. 1 ref
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Crane, T.A.; Siregar, P.R.
2011-01-01
Inspired by the Farmer Field School methodology, a “Climate Field School” was conducted with farmers in the Indramayu region of Indonesia in 2003 to promote adaptive application of climate forecasts to crop selection decisions. However, five years after the Climate Field School, use of the forecasts
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International Nuclear Information System (INIS)
1994-01-01
The book contains the lectures held at a meeting on the Bavarian Climate Research Programme. The lectures deal with climate history; current global and regional influences on climate; climate modeling; impact of air pollution; and the changes in infra-red radiation and their effects on man and plants. (KW) [de
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OpenClimateGIS - A Web Service Providing Climate Model Data in Commonly Used Geospatial Formats
Erickson, T. A.; Koziol, B. W.; Rood, R. B.
2011-12-01
The goal of the OpenClimateGIS project is to make climate model datasets readily available in commonly used, modern geospatial formats used by GIS software, browser-based mapping tools, and virtual globes.The climate modeling community typically stores climate data in multidimensional gridded formats capable of efficiently storing large volumes of data (such as netCDF, grib) while the geospatial community typically uses flexible vector and raster formats that are capable of storing small volumes of data (relative to the multidimensional gridded formats). OpenClimateGIS seeks to address this difference in data formats by clipping climate data to user-specified vector geometries (i.e. areas of interest) and translating the gridded data on-the-fly into multiple vector formats. The OpenClimateGIS system does not store climate data archives locally, but rather works in conjunction with external climate archives that expose climate data via the OPeNDAP protocol. OpenClimateGIS provides a RESTful API web service for accessing climate data resources via HTTP, allowing a wide range of applications to access the climate data.The OpenClimateGIS system has been developed using open source development practices and the source code is publicly available. The project integrates libraries from several other open source projects (including Django, PostGIS, numpy, Shapely, and netcdf4-python).OpenClimateGIS development is supported by a grant from NOAA's Climate Program Office.
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The physics and dynamics of the climate system simulation of climate change
International Nuclear Information System (INIS)
Mitchell, J.F.B.
1991-01-01
The use of climate models is described, using examples related to: the greenhouse effect, the principal absorbers, past, present and future, climate feedbacks in CO2 experiments, equilibrium climate change due to increased CO2, modelling the transient response to increases in trace gases, uncertainties in the simulation and detection of the climatic effect of increased trace gas, simulations for 9000 years before present
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Research on climate effects. Effects of climate changes. Proceedings
International Nuclear Information System (INIS)
Fischer, W.; Stein, G.
1991-01-01
Global changes affecting the earth are at the forefront of public interest, possibly caused by climate alterations amongst other things. The public expects appropriate measures from politics to successfully adapt to unavoidable climate changes. As well as an investigation into the causes of climatic changes and the corollaries between the different scientific phenomena, the effects on the economy and society must also be examined. The Federal Minister for Research and Technology aims to make a valuable German contribution to international Global Change Research with the focal point ''Effects of Climate Changes on the Ecological and Civil System''. The aim of the workshop was to give an outline of current scientific knowledge, sketch out research requirements and give recommendations on the focal point with regard to the BMFT. (orig.) [de
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Merlis, Timothy M.; Held, Isaac M.; Stenchikov, Georgiy L.; Zeng, Fanrong; Horowitz, Larry W.
2014-01-01
Coupled climate model simulations of volcanic eruptions and abrupt changes in CO2 concentration are compared in multiple realizations of the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory Climate Model, version 2.1 (GFDL CM2.1). The change in global-mean surface temperature (GMST) is analyzed to determine whether a fast component of the climate sensitivity of relevance to the transient climate response (TCR; defined with the 1%yr-1 CO2-increase scenario) can be estimated from shorter-time-scale climate changes. The fast component of the climate sensitivity estimated from the response of the climate model to volcanic forcing is similar to that of the simulations forced by abrupt CO2 changes but is 5%-15% smaller than the TCR. In addition, the partition between the top-of-atmosphere radiative restoring and ocean heat uptake is similar across radiative forcing agents. The possible asymmetry between warming and cooling climate perturbations, which may affect the utility of volcanic eruptions for estimating the TCR, is assessed by comparing simulations of abrupt CO2 doubling to abrupt CO2 halving. There is slightly less (~5%) GMST change in 0.5 × CO2 simulations than in 2 × CO2 simulations on the short (~10 yr) time scales relevant to the fast component of the volcanic signal. However, inferring the TCR from volcanic eruptions is more sensitive to uncertainties from internal climate variability and the estimation procedure. The response of the GMST to volcanic eruptions is similar in GFDL CM2.1 and GFDL Climate Model, version 3 (CM3), even though the latter has a higher TCR associated with a multidecadal time scale in its response. This is consistent with the expectation that the fast component of the climate sensitivity inferred from volcanic eruptions is a lower bound for the TCR.
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Merlis, Timothy M.
2014-10-01
Coupled climate model simulations of volcanic eruptions and abrupt changes in CO2 concentration are compared in multiple realizations of the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory Climate Model, version 2.1 (GFDL CM2.1). The change in global-mean surface temperature (GMST) is analyzed to determine whether a fast component of the climate sensitivity of relevance to the transient climate response (TCR; defined with the 1%yr-1 CO2-increase scenario) can be estimated from shorter-time-scale climate changes. The fast component of the climate sensitivity estimated from the response of the climate model to volcanic forcing is similar to that of the simulations forced by abrupt CO2 changes but is 5%-15% smaller than the TCR. In addition, the partition between the top-of-atmosphere radiative restoring and ocean heat uptake is similar across radiative forcing agents. The possible asymmetry between warming and cooling climate perturbations, which may affect the utility of volcanic eruptions for estimating the TCR, is assessed by comparing simulations of abrupt CO2 doubling to abrupt CO2 halving. There is slightly less (~5%) GMST change in 0.5 × CO2 simulations than in 2 × CO2 simulations on the short (~10 yr) time scales relevant to the fast component of the volcanic signal. However, inferring the TCR from volcanic eruptions is more sensitive to uncertainties from internal climate variability and the estimation procedure. The response of the GMST to volcanic eruptions is similar in GFDL CM2.1 and GFDL Climate Model, version 3 (CM3), even though the latter has a higher TCR associated with a multidecadal time scale in its response. This is consistent with the expectation that the fast component of the climate sensitivity inferred from volcanic eruptions is a lower bound for the TCR.
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GLOBAL CLIMATE MODEL:A COMPREHENSIVE TOOL IN CLIMATE CHANGE IMPACT STUDIES
Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)
Dharmaveer Singh
2015-01-01
Full Text Available There is growing concern, how and to what extent future changes in climate will affect human society and natural environments. Continuous emissions of Green House Gasses (GHGs at or above current rates will cause further warming. This, in turn, may modify global climate system during 21st century that very likely would have larger impacts than those observed during 20th century. At present, Global Climate Models (GCMs are only the most reliable tools available for studying behaviour of the climate system. This paper presents a comprehensive review of GCMs including their development and applications in climate change impacts studies. Following a discussion of the limitations of GCMs at regional and local scales, different approaches of downscaling are discussed in detail.
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Kinzig, Ann P.
2015-03-01
This paper is intended as a brief introduction to climate adaptation in a conference devoted otherwise to the physics of sustainable energy. Whereas mitigation involves measures to reduce the probability of a potential event, such as climate change, adaptation refers to actions that lessen the impact of climate change. Mitigation and adaptation differ in other ways as well. Adaptation does not necessarily have to be implemented immediately to be effective; it only needs to be in place before the threat arrives. Also, adaptation does not necessarily require global, coordinated action; many effective adaptation actions can be local. Some urban communities, because of land-use change and the urban heat-island effect, currently face changes similar to some expected under climate change, such as changes in water availability, heat-related morbidity, or changes in disease patterns. Concern over those impacts might motivate the implementation of measures that would also help in climate adaptation, despite skepticism among some policy makers about anthropogenic global warming. Studies of ancient civilizations in the southwestern US lends some insight into factors that may or may not be important to successful adaptation.
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The ESA climate change initiative: Satellite data records for essential climate variables
DEFF Research Database (Denmark)
Hollmann, R.; Merchant, C.J.; Saunders, R.
2013-01-01
The European Space Agency (ESA) has launched the Climate Change Initiative (CCI) to provide satellite-based climate data records (CDRs) that meet the challenging requirements of the climate community. The aim is to realize the full potential of the long-term Earth observation (EO) archives...... that both ESA and third parties have established. This includes aspects of producing a CDR, which involve data acquisition, calibration, algorithm development, validation, maintenance, and provision of the data to the climate research community. The CCI is consistent with several international efforts...... targeting the generation of satellite derived climate data records. One focus of the CCI is to provide products for climate modelers who increasingly use satellite data to initialize, constrain, and validate models on a wide range of space and time scales....
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Should the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change recognize climate migrants?
Gibb, Christine; Ford, James
2012-12-01
Climate change is expected to increase migration flows, especially from socially and environmentally vulnerable populations. These ‘climate migrants’ do not have any official protection under international law, which has implications for the human security of migrants. This work argues that the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) can and should recognize climate migrants, and is the most relevant international framework for doing so. While not legally binding, the acknowledgment of climate displacement, migration and planned relocation issues in the UNFCCC’s Cancun Adaptation Framework indicates a willingness to address the issue through an adaptation lens. Herein, the paper proposes a framework for setting the institutional groundwork for recognizing climate migrants, focusing on the most vulnerable, promoting targeted research and policy agendas, and situating policies within a comprehensive strategy.
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Should the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change recognize climate migrants?
International Nuclear Information System (INIS)
Gibb, Christine; Ford, James
2012-01-01
Climate change is expected to increase migration flows, especially from socially and environmentally vulnerable populations. These ‘climate migrants’ do not have any official protection under international law, which has implications for the human security of migrants. This work argues that the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) can and should recognize climate migrants, and is the most relevant international framework for doing so. While not legally binding, the acknowledgment of climate displacement, migration and planned relocation issues in the UNFCCC’s Cancun Adaptation Framework indicates a willingness to address the issue through an adaptation lens. Herein, the paper proposes a framework for setting the institutional groundwork for recognizing climate migrants, focusing on the most vulnerable, promoting targeted research and policy agendas, and situating policies within a comprehensive strategy. (letter)
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Climatic Change. Human Influence?
Gonçalves, Dionísio; Leite, Solange; Ribeiro, A.C.; Figueiredo, Tomás de
2016-01-01
We begin by presenting the functioning of the Climate System and the variety of climates that occurs on the surface of the globe. We analyze climate change based on the sun's orbital parameters and other causes, focusing on the current interglacial period and the influence it had on the development of human societies. The following text looks on developing of the climate of the last 1000 years, with considerations about the warm medieval climate, the little ice age, the recovery...
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The mission of the USDA Southwest Regional Climate Hub is to provide farmers, ranchers and forest land owners and managers with information and resources to cope with the impacts of climate change. As such, a clear understanding of landowner needs for weather and climate data and their attitudes abo...
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Climate change and climate variability: personal motivation for adaptation and mitigation
Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)
Ploubidis George B
2011-05-01
Full Text Available Abstract Background Global climate change impacts on human and natural systems are predicted to be severe, far reaching, and to affect the most physically and economically vulnerable disproportionately. Society can respond to these threats through two strategies: mitigation and adaptation. Industry, commerce, and government play indispensable roles in these actions but so do individuals, if they are receptive to behavior change. We explored whether the health frame can be used as a context to motivate behavioral reductions of greenhouse gas emissions and adaptation measures. Methods In 2008, we conducted a cross-sectional survey in the United States using random digit dialing. Personal relevance of climate change from health threats was explored with the Health Belief Model (HBM as a conceptual frame and analyzed through logistic regressions and path analysis. Results Of 771 individuals surveyed, 81% (n = 622 acknowledged that climate change was occurring, and were aware of the associated ecologic and human health risks. Respondents reported reduced energy consumption if they believed climate change could affect their way of life (perceived susceptibility, Odds Ratio (OR = 2.4 (95% Confidence Interval (CI: 1.4 - 4.0, endanger their life (perceived severity, OR = 1.9 (95% CI: 1.1 - 3.1, or saw serious barriers to protecting themselves from climate change, OR = 2.1 (95% CI: 1.2 - 3.5. Perceived susceptibility had the strongest effect on reduced energy consumption, either directly or indirectly via perceived severity. Those that reported having the necessary information to prepare for climate change impacts were more likely to have an emergency kit OR = 2.1 (95% CI: 1.4 - 3.1 or plan, OR = 2.2 (95% CI: 1.5 -3.2 for their household, but also saw serious barriers to protecting themselves from climate change or climate variability, either by having an emergency kit OR = 1.6 (95% CI: 1.1 - 2.4 or an emergency plan OR = 1.5 (95%CI: 1.0 - 2
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International Nuclear Information System (INIS)
Viner, D.; Hulme, M.; Raper, S.C.B.; Jones, P.D.
1994-01-01
This paper outlines the different methods which may be used for the construction of regional climate change scenarios. The main focus of the paper is the construction of global climate change scenarios from climate change experiments carried out using General Circulation Models (GCMS) An introduction to some GCM climate change experiments highlights the difference between model types and experiments (e.g., equilibrium or transient). The latest generation of climate change experiments has been performed using fully coupled ocean-atmosphere GCMS. These allow transient simulations of climate change to be performed with respect to a given greenhouse gas forcing scenario. There are, however, a number of problems with these simulations which pose difficulties for the construction of climate change scenarios for use in climate change impacts assessment. The characteristics of the transient climate change experiments which pose difficulties for the construction of climate change scenarios are discussed. Three examples of these problems are: different climate change experiments use different greenhouse gas concentration scenarios; the 'cold-start' problem makes it difficult to link future projections of climate change to a given calendar year; a drift of the climate is noticeable in the control simulations. In order to construct climate change scenarios for impacts assessment a method has therefore to be employed which addresses these problems. At present the climate modeling and climate change impacts communities are somewhat polarized in their approach to spatial scales. Current GCMs model the climate at resolutions larger than 2.5 x 3.75 degree, while the majority of impacts assessment studies are undertaken at scales below 50km (or 0.5 degree). This paper concludes by addressing the problems in bringing together these two different modeling perspectives by presenting a number of regional climate change scenarios. 35 refs., 8 figs., 2 tabs
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The climate4impact platform: Providing, tailoring and facilitating climate model data access
Pagé, Christian; Pagani, Andrea; Plieger, Maarten; Som de Cerff, Wim; Mihajlovski, Andrej; de Vreede, Ernst; Spinuso, Alessandro; Hutjes, Ronald; de Jong, Fokke; Bärring, Lars; Vega, Manuel; Cofiño, Antonio; d'Anca, Alessandro; Fiore, Sandro; Kolax, Michael
2017-04-01
One of the main objectives of climate4impact is to provide standardized web services and tools that are reusable in other portals. These services include web processing services, web coverage services and web mapping services (WPS, WCS and WMS). Tailored portals can be targeted to specific communities and/or countries/regions while making use of those services. Easier access to climate data is very important for the climate change impact communities. To fulfill this objective, the climate4impact (http://climate4impact.eu/) web portal and services has been developed, targeting climate change impact modellers, impact and adaptation consultants, as well as other experts using climate change data. It provides to users harmonized access to climate model data through tailored services. It features static and dynamic documentation, Use Cases and best practice examples, an advanced search interface, an integrated authentication and authorization system with the Earth System Grid Federation (ESGF), a visualization interface with ADAGUC web mapping tools. In the latest version, statistical downscaling services, provided by the Santander Meteorology Group Downscaling Portal, were integrated. An innovative interface to integrate statistical downscaling services will be released in the upcoming version. The latter will be a big step in bridging the gap between climate scientists and the climate change impact communities. The climate4impact portal builds on the infrastructure of an international distributed database that has been set to disseminate the results from the global climate model results of the Coupled Model Intercomparison project Phase 5 (CMIP5). This database, the ESGF, is an international collaboration that develops, deploys and maintains software infrastructure for the management, dissemination, and analysis of climate model data. The European FP7 project IS-ENES, Infrastructure for the European Network for Earth System modelling, supports the European
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International Nuclear Information System (INIS)
Perthuis, Ch. de; Delbosc, A.
2009-01-01
Received ideas about climatic change are a mixture of right and wrong information. The authors use these ideas as starting points to shade light on what we really know and what we believe to know. The book is divided in three main chapters: should we act in front of climatic change? How can we efficiently act? How can we equitably act? For each chapter a series of received ideas is analyzed in order to find those which can usefully contribute to mitigate the environmental, economical and social impacts of climatic change. (J.S.)
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Sensitivity of climate models: Comparison of simulated and observed patterns for past climates
International Nuclear Information System (INIS)
Prell, W.L.; Webb, T. III.
1992-08-01
Predicting the potential climatic effects of increased concentrations of atmospheric carbon dioxide requires the continuing development of climate models. Confidence in the predictions will be much enhanced once the models are thoroughly tested in terms of their ability to simulate climates that differ significantly from today's climate. As one index of the magnitude of past climate change, the global mean temperature increase during the past 18,000 years is similar to that predicted for carbon dioxide--doubling. Simulating the climatic changes of the past 18,000 years, as well as the warmer-than-present climate of 6000 years ago and the climate of the last interglacial, around 126,000 years ago, provides an excellent opportunity to test the models that are being used in global climate change research. During the past several years, we have used paleoclimatic data to test the accuracy of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, Community Climate Model, Version 0, after changing its boundary conditions to those appropriate for past climates. We have assembled regional and near-global paleoclimatic data sets of pollen, lake level, and marine plankton data and calibrated many of the data in terms of climatic variables. We have also developed methods that permit direct quantitative comparisons between the data and model results. Our research has shown that comparing the model results with the data is an evolutionary process, because the models, the data, and the methods for comparison are continually being improved. During 1992, we have completed new modeling experiments, further analyzed previous model experiments, compiled new paleodata, made new comparisons between data and model results, and participated in workshops on paleoclimatic modeling
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A.E. Daniels; J.F. Morrison; L.A. Joyce; N.L. Crookston; S.C. Chen; S.G. McNulty
2012-01-01
Climate scenarios offer one way to identify and examine the land management challenges posed by climate change. Selecting projections, however, requires careful consideration of the natural resources under study, and where and how they are sensitive to climate. Selection also depends on the robustness of different projections for the resources and geographic area of...
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School Climate Research Summary: August 2012. School Climate Brief, Number 3
Thapa, Amrit; Cohen, Jonathan; Higgins-D'Alessandro, Ann; Guffey, Shawn
2012-01-01
Over the past three decades, researchers and educators have increasingly recognized the importance of K-12 school climate. This summary report builds on previous school climate reviews and details how school climate is associated with and/or promotes safety, healthy relationships, engaged learning and teaching and school improvement efforts. In…
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The new WMO RA VI Regional Climate Centre on Climate Monitoring
Rapp, J.; Nitsche, H.
2010-09-01
Regional Climate Centres (RCCs) are institutions with the capacity and mandate by WMO to develop high quality regional-scale products using global products and incorporating regional information. Recently a pilot network of three RCC consortia was established for the WMO region RA VI (Europe and Middle East): • RCC node on climate data, • RCC node on climate monitoring, • RCC node on long-range forecasting. DWD/Germany has taken the responsibility of the RCC node on climate monitoring (RRC-CM). Further consortium members are Armstatehydromet/Armenia, Météo-France/France, KNMI/The Netherlands, RHMS/Serbia, and TSMS/Turkey. RCCs provide online access to their products and services to national meteorological and hydrological services and to other regional users. Vice versa, RCCs receive data, products, know-how and feedbacks from the meteorological services as a main source for regional information. By the same time, they provide regional data, products and feedbacks to Global Production Centres and Lead Centres for respective verification and product optimisation of the global-scale information. The RCC-CM will perform basic functions covering the domain of climate monitoring: • Annual and monthly climate diagnostic bulletins, • Monthly monitoring maps: global, RAVI, Eastern Mediterranean, South Caucasus, • Reference climatologies and trend maps, • RA VI climate monitoring WebPortal, • Climate watches, • Training; Research and Development (R&D). The poster shows the current stage of development of the RCC-CM by means of example products.
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Nawrotzki, Raphael J; Bakhtsiyarava, Maryia
2017-05-01
Research often assumes that, in rural areas of developing countries, adverse climatic conditions increase (climate driver mechanism) rather than reduce (climate inhibitor mechanism) migration, and that the impact of climate on migration is moderated by changes in agricultural productivity (agricultural pathway). Using representative census data in combination with high-resolution climate data derived from the novel Terra Populus system, we explore the climate-migration relationship in rural Burkina Faso and Senegal. We construct four threshold-based climate measures to investigate the effect of heat waves, cold snaps, droughts and excessive precipitation on the likelihood of household-level international outmigration. Results from multi-level logit models show that excessive precipitation increases international migration from Senegal while heat waves decrease international mobility in Burkina Faso, providing evidence for the climate inhibitor mechanism. Consistent with the agricultural pathway, interaction models and results from a geographically weighted regression (GWR) reveal a conditional effect of droughts on international outmigration from Senegal, which becomes stronger in areas with high levels of groundnut production. Moreover, climate change effects show a clear seasonal pattern, with the strongest effects appearing when heat waves overlap with the growing season and when excessive precipitation occurs prior to the growing season.
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International Nuclear Information System (INIS)
Anon.
1996-01-01
The dossier on Climate and Energy encompasses contributions addressing the following topics: Climate research in Germany, perspectives of the energy of the future; Energy-conserving building design, construction and retrofitting; Companies developing ecological awareness and ecological performance; World population, energy consumption and greenhouse gas abatement; On the uncertainty involved in political evaluation of the global climate change; Economic aspects of the carbon dioxide issue; Ozone - polar stratospheres - clouds and ozone hole; Ozone - vertical ozone distribution in the antarctic region; Sudden climate change; Sulfate aerosols and climate change; Symptoms of the global climate change; IKARUS - greenhouse gas abatement strategies; Energy from fossil fuels; Renewable energy sources; Nuclear fusion; Is there a chance for nuclear energy?; Least-cost planning leading to energy-conserving power plants; Pleading for a sustainable energy economy; Why we both love and destroy nature. The concluding two contributions are interviews highlighting two statements: We will persist in our intention to achieve the declared objectives for greenhouse gas abatement, and: We cannot do without nuclear energy. (RHM) [de
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Future climate. Engineering solutions
Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)
Ferdinand, J.F.; Hagedorn-Rasmussen, P.; Fonnesbech, B.
2009-09-15
Future Climate Engineering Solutions - Joint Report is the common output and a documentation of more than 1 year's effort by 13 engineering associations - in 12 countries - to demonstrate how technologies can combat climate change. The report consists of three parts: Summaries of 10 national climate plans and technology prospects, 5 Key Common Findings, and a Climate Call from Engineers to create a new global climate treaty. The basic assumption of the project is recognition that GHG emissions, and their concentration in the atmosphere, must be reduced to a sustainable level. The project definition of a sustainable level is equivalent to the best-case stabilisation scenario which was presented in the 4th Assessment Report (AR4) by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), whereby the global mean temperature is most likely to stabilise at 2.0-2.4 deg. C. The Future Climate website www.futureclimate.info holds more information about the project, including possibility to download project material, including the full national climate plans.
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Climate, lies and propaganda; Climat, mensonges et propagande
Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)
Arezki, A.
2010-07-01
There is today a strong scientific controversy between alarmist climatologists who consider that the human activities are responsible of the global warming, and climate-skeptics for whom the climate change has a natural origin. Without any passion and far away from any lobby, the author proposes a radical analysis of the situation by answering the essential questions: what is the real extent of global warming? Is this warming unprecedented? Should we alarm for? Except human activities, what other serious hypotheses could explain the actual climatic change? Beside the scientific aspects, this book reveals also the real political, economical and media-staged aspects of the global warming debate. (J.S.)
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Climate Change Impact Assessment of Hydro-Climate in Southern Peninsular Malaysia
Ercan, A.; Ishida, K.; Kavvas, M. L.; Chen, Z. R.; Jang, S.; Amin, M. Z. M.; Shaaban, A. J.
2017-12-01
Impacts of climate change on the hydroclimate of the coastal region in the south of Peninsular Malaysia in the 21st century was assessed by means of a regional climate model utilizing an ensemble of 15 different future climate realizations. Coarse resolution Global Climate Models' future projections covering four emission scenarios based on Coupled Model Intercomparison Project phase 3 (CMIP3) datasets were dynamically downscaled to 6 km resolution over the study area. The analyses were made in terms of rainfall, air temperature, evapotranporation, and soil water storage.
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Regional climate response collaboratives: Multi-institutional support for climate resilience
Averyt, Kristen; Derner, Justin D.; Dilling, Lisa; Guerrero, Rafael; Joyce, Linda A.; McNeeley, Shannon; McNie, Elizabeth; Morisette, Jeffrey T.; Ojima, Dennis; O'Malley, Robin; Peck, Dannele; Ray, Andrea J.; Reeves, Matt; Travis, William
2018-01-01
Federal investments by U.S. agencies to enhance climate resilience at regional scales grew over the past decade (2010s). To maximize efficiency and effectiveness in serving multiple sectors and scales, it has become critical to leverage existing agency-specific research, infrastructure, and capacity while avoiding redundancy. We discuss lessons learned from a multi-institutional “regional climate response collaborative” that comprises three different federally-supported climate service entities in the Rocky Mountain west and northern plains region. These lessons include leveraging different strengths of each partner, creating deliberate mechanisms to increase cross-entity communication and joint ownership of projects, and placing a common priority on stakeholder-relevant research and outcomes. We share the conditions that fostered successful collaboration, which can be transferred elsewhere, and suggest mechanisms for overcoming potential barriers. Synergies are essential for producing actionable research that informs climate-related decisions for stakeholders and ultimately enhances climate resilience at regional scales.
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Berger, W. H.; Crowell, J. C.
1982-01-01
Complex atmosphere-ocean-land interactions govern the climate system and its variations. During the course of Earth history, nature has performed a large number of experiments involving climatic change; the geologic record contains much information regarding these experiments. This information should result in an increased understanding of the climate system, including climatic stability and factors that perturb climate. In addition, the paleoclimatic record has been demonstrated to be useful in interpreting the origin of important resources-petroleum, natural gas, coal, phosphate deposits, and many others.
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Co-benefits of climate policies: a potential keystone of climate negotiations?
International Nuclear Information System (INIS)
Cassen, Christophe; Guivarch, Celine; Lecocq, Franck
2015-01-01
This paper analyzes the challenges related to the assessment of co-benefits of climate policies underpinned by the implementation of multi-objective policies which seek synergies between climate policies and other development objectives (poverty alleviation, employment, health etc.). The analysis highlights the increasing interest in co-benefits in the latest 5. IPCC report, in particular by integrated models. Nevertheless, the quantified evaluation of co-benefits is still confronted to several methodological limitations which reduce the scope of co-benefits, particularly at the global level. In a growing context of climate-development approaches in climate negotiations, this article insists on the need to also assess co-benefits of other policies which induce a significant part of GHG emissions. Considering climate policies focused only on Greenhouse Gases emissions reduction limits the range of policy instruments to carbon taxation, tradable carbon emissions permits or dedicated mitigation and adaptation funds. This also hinders the integration of climate objectives in non-climate policies. Analyzing impacts of development policies on Green Gases emissions in the form of co-benefits requires to broaden the range of policy instruments and to take into account other drivers of emissions such as land dynamics. Including these mechanisms in integrated models therefore represents new scientific frontiers for integrated models in the coming years
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Weather Service NWS logo - Click to go to the NWS home page Climate Prediction Center Home Site Map News Organization Enter Search Term(s): Search Search the CPC Go NCEP Quarterly Newsletter Climate Highlights U.S Climate-Weather El Niño/La Niña MJO Blocking AAO, AO, NAO, PNA Climatology Global Monsoons Expert
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International Nuclear Information System (INIS)
Kandel, R.
1990-01-01
The author presents an overview of the changing climate. Attention is focused on the following: meteorology; weather; climate anomalies; changes in atmospheric composition and global warming; ozone; mathematical models; and climate and politics. In its conclusion, it asks researchers to stay out of a game in which, ultimately, neither science nor politics stands to gain anything
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International Nuclear Information System (INIS)
Watson, H.L.; Bach, M.C.; Goklany, I.M.
1991-01-01
The various agents of global change that will affect the state of natural resources 50-100 years from now are discussed. These include economic and population growth, technological progress, and climatic change. The importance of climatic change lies in its effects on natural resources and on human activities that depend on those resources. Other factors affecting those resources include the demand on those resources from an increasing population and from a growing economy, and a more efficient use of those resources that comes from technological changes and from the consequences of economic growth itself. It is shown that there is a considerable ability to adapt to climatic change, since humans already have an intrinsic ability to adapt to the wide variations in climates that already exist and since technological developments can make it easier to cope with climatic variability. It appears that agents other than climatic change are more significant to the future state of natural resources than climatic change. Criteria for selecting options for addressing climatic change are outlined. Technological change and economic growth are seen to be key response options, since the vulnerability to climatic change depends on economic resources and technological progress. Specific options to stimulate sustainable economic growth and technological progress are listed. 16 refs., 1 fig., 2 tabs
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Shaping the Planetary Climate? The Prospects for Climate Engineering
International Nuclear Information System (INIS)
Marsollat, B.
2011-01-01
For several years now, global warming has occupied a leading place in the list of major challenges humanity has to confront and is, therefore, very logically the focus of regular international negotiations aimed at contributing to a solution. For the moment, however, the only international political responses envisaged for curbing climate change attack the identified cause of the problem - greenhouse gas emissions - with the intention of reducing the volume of those emissions in the shortest possible time-frame. However, as Baptiste Marsollat shows here, other, more technological responses exist which consist not in working on greenhouse gas emissions, but either in capturing/imprisoning these gases or, more ambitiously, in modifying solar radiation to reduce ongoing climate warming. This would mean applying the techniques of climate engineering or geo-engineering. Such a prospect has generated great controversy, but it cannot, for all that, be ignored indefinitely in the thinking on combating global warming. This article reviews the subject of climate engineering (what is it and to what extent can we do it?) and the role it might play in the battle against climate change. It shows how this - long-tabooed - option is now finding a place within the most official circles in the Anglo-Saxon world. Without concealing the concerns to which it may, more or less justifiably, give rise, Marsollat shows that, faced with a dramatic choice, we might opt in the end for climate engineering as a way to fight global warming. And from a more proactive perspective, he also suggests we should reflect on how appropriate it might be to use it for shaping the planet's climate and, in that way, for meeting a number of other major challenges. (author)
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Climate Prediction Center - Site Index
Weather Service NWS logo - Click to go to the NWS home page Climate Prediction Center Home Site Map News Means Bulletins Annual Winter Stratospheric Ozone Climate Diagnostics Bulletin (Most Recent) Climate (Hazards Outlook) Climate Assessment: Dec. 1999-Feb. 2000 (Seasonal) Climate Assessment: Mar-May 2000
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Regional climate projection of the Maritime Continent using the MIT Regional Climate Model
IM, E. S.; Eltahir, E. A. B.
2014-12-01
Given that warming of the climate system is unequivocal (IPCC AR5), accurate assessment of future climate is essential to understand the impact of climate change due to global warming. Modelling the climate change of the Maritime Continent is particularly challenge, showing a high degree of uncertainty. Compared to other regions, model agreement of future projections in response to anthropogenic emission forcings is much less. Furthermore, the spatial and temporal behaviors of climate projections seem to vary significantly due to a complex geographical condition and a wide range of scale interactions. For the fine-scale climate information (27 km) suitable for representing the complexity of climate change over the Maritime Continent, dynamical downscaling is performed using the MIT regional climate model (MRCM) during two thirty-year period for reference (1970-1999) and future (2070-2099) climate. Initial and boundary conditions are provided by Community Earth System Model (CESM) simulations under the emission scenarios projected by MIT Integrated Global System Model (IGSM). Changes in mean climate as well as the frequency and intensity of extreme climate events are investigated at various temporal and spatial scales. Our analysis is primarily centered on the different behavior of changes in convective and large-scale precipitation over land vs. ocean during dry vs. wet season. In addition, we attempt to find the added value to downscaled results over the Maritime Continent through the comparison between MRCM and CESM projection. Acknowledgements.This research was supported by the National Research Foundation Singapore through the Singapore MIT Alliance for Research and Technology's Center for Environmental Sensing and Modeling interdisciplinary research program.
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DEFF Research Database (Denmark)
Almlund, Pernille
reports. This paper is based on a wonder of why the IPCC’s analysis and reports are not, to a higher degree, based on social science and human science. Are these scientific perspectives with many different approaches not important to this global political awareness of climate change? Especially now when...... all the IPCC’s assessment report have concluded that climate changes are human made and recently stated that 97 % of all climate researchers agree in that conclusion. Due to the theoretical work of Michel Callon, Lascoumes and Barthe (2011) and their ANT perspective, climate change can be observed...
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International Nuclear Information System (INIS)
2006-01-01
This paper presented indicators of climate change for British Columbia (BC) with an emphasis on the coastal region. An overview of global effects of climate change was presented, as well as details of BC's current climate change action plan. Indicators examined in the paper for the BC coastal region included long-term trends in air temperature; long-term trends in precipitation; coastal ocean temperatures; sea levels on the BC coast; and the sensitivity of the BC coast to sea level rise and erosion. Data suggested that average air temperatures have become higher in many areas, and that Springtime temperatures have become warmer over the whole province. Winters have become drier in many areas of the province. Sea surface temperature has risen over the entire coast, with the North Coast and central Strait of Georgia showing the largest increases. Deep-water temperatures have also increased in 5 inlets on the South Coast. Results suggested that the direction and spatial pattern of the climate changes reported for British Columbia are consistent with broader trends in North America and the type of changes predicted by climate models for the region. Climate change will likely result in reduced snow-pack in southern BC. An earlier spring freshet on many snow-dominated river systems is anticipated as well as glacial retreat and disappearance. Warmer temperatures in some lakes and rivers are expected, as well as the increased frequency and severity of natural disturbances such as the pine mountain beetle. Large-scale shifts in ecosystems and the loss of certain ecosystems may also occur. BC's current climate plan includes cost effective actions that address GHG emissions and support efficient infrastructure and opportunities for innovation. Management programs for forest and agricultural lands have been initiated, as well as programs to reduce emissions from government operations. Research is also being conducted to understand the impacts of climate change on water
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Climate negotiators' and scientists' assessments of the climate negotiations
Dannenberg, Astrid; Zitzelsberger, Sonja; Tavoni, Alessandro
2017-06-01
Climate negotiation outcomes are difficult to evaluate objectively because there are no clear reference scenarios. Subjective assessments from those directly involved in the negotiations are particularly important, as this may influence strategy and future negotiation participation. Here we analyse the perceived success of the climate negotiations in a sample of 656 experts involved in international climate policy. Respondents were pessimistic when asked for specific assessments of the current approach centred on voluntary pledges, but were more optimistic when asked for general assessments of the outcomes and usefulness of the climate negotiations. Individuals who were more involved in the negotiation process tended to be more optimistic, especially in terms of general assessments. Our results indicate that two reinforcing effects are at work: a high degree of involvement changes individuals' perceptions and more optimistic individuals are more inclined to remain involved in the negotiations.
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Climate Testimonies and Climate-crisis Narratives. Inuit Delegated to Speak on Behalf of the Climate
DEFF Research Database (Denmark)
Bjørst, Lill Rastad
2012-01-01
challenges the use of climate testimonies in the international climatechange debate. Specifically, what is drawn upon in these personal experiences with the environment, and how is it useful in a public, political, or scientific context? In the conclusion of this article, it is argued that dominant climate...
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Modelling Interglacial Climate
DEFF Research Database (Denmark)
Pedersen, Rasmus Anker
the impact of a changing sea ice cover. The first part focusses on the last interglacial climate (125,000 years before present) which was characterized by substantial warming at high northern latitudes due to an increased insolation during summer. The simulations reveal that the oceanic changes dominate......Past warm climate states could potentially provide information on future global warming. The past warming was driven by changed insolation rather than an increased greenhouse effect, and thus the warm climate states are expected to be different. Nonetheless, the response of the climate system......, with maximum warming occurring in winter. The three scenarios all affect the climate beyond the Arctic, especially the mid-latitude circulation which is sensitive to the location of the ice loss. Together, the results presented in this thesis illustrate that the changes in the Arctic sea ice cover...
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International Nuclear Information System (INIS)
Newell, P.
2000-01-01
Climate for Change: Non-State Actors and the Global Politics of the Greenhouse provides a challenging explanation of the forces that have shaped the international global warming debate. Unlike existing books on the politics of climate change, this book concentrates on how non-stage actors, such as scientific, environmental and industry groups, as opposed to governmental organisations, affect political outcomes in global fora on climate change. It also provides insights in to the role of the media in influencing the agenda. The book draws on a range of analytical approaches to assess and explain the influence of these non-governmental organisations in the course of global climate change politics. The book will be of interest to all researchers and policy-makers associated with climate change, and will be used on university courses in international relations, politics and environmental studies. (Author)
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International Nuclear Information System (INIS)
Poitou, Jean; Braconnot, Pascale; Masson-Delmotte, Valerie
2015-01-01
In this book, the authors first present the climate system as it operates under the influence of the atmosphere and oceans: Earth heated by the Sun, temperatures and movements within the atmosphere, surface and deep circulation in the oceans, exchanges between the atmosphere and the oceans. They present the various actors of climate and their interactions: water cycle, carbon cycle, greenhouse effect, clouds, aerosols, ocean, cryosphere-climate interaction, interaction between continental biosphere and climate, interactions between climate, continents and lithosphere, feedbacks and climate sensitivity. They comment the variety of climates and their variability when considered on a large scale (role of the Sun, ocean-atmosphere oscillations in El Nino and La Nina, North Atlantic oscillation, other examples of oscillations). The next part addresses climate modelling: model fundamentals (parameters and other components, coupling between components), model adjustment (simulation types, multi-model sets, and model assessment), models of intermediate complexity, regional models. The authors discuss the warming phenomenon: history of temperature measurements, clues of global warming, how to make climate change. They propose a presentation and discussion of anthropogenic and natural factors which disturb the climate: CO 2 and other greenhouse gases, changes in soil uses, other possible causes of climate disturbance (aerosol, aircraft wakes, volcanoes, and sun), combination of these disturbances, and identification of anthropogenic disturbances. They discuss past climate evolutions, and finally discuss how the climate could evolve in the future
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International aspects of climate change: The intergovernmental panel on climate change
International Nuclear Information System (INIS)
Brydges, T.; Fenech, A.
1990-01-01
The impact of various international conferences concerning global climate change on international opinions and attitudes is discussed. A number of conferences over the past two decades have drawn attention to the large socio-economic consequences of climate change. There has been increasing attention given to the likely affect of anthropogenically derived greenhouse gases on the global climate. Some early uncertainty over the likely long term changes in global temperature have been replaced by a scientific consensus that global temperatures are increasing and will continue to do so into the next century. Public awareness of the possibility of climate change and severe socio-economic consequences has been increasing and was given a major impetus by the Toronto Conference on the Changing Atmosphere. An estimate of the possible time to solution of the climate change issue is given as 1988-2005, a span of 17 years. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has focused work into three working groups examining science, impacts and response strategies. 28 refs., 3 figs., 6 tabs
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Climate Change, Politics and Religion: Australian Churchgoers’ Beliefs about Climate Change
Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)
Miriam Pepper
2016-05-01
Full Text Available A growing literature has sought to understand the relationships between religion, politics and views about climate change and climate change policy in the United States. However, little comparative research has been conducted in other countries. This study draws on data from the 2011 Australian National Church Life Survey to examine the beliefs of Australian churchgoers from some 20 denominations about climate change—whether or not it is real and whether it is caused by humans—and political factors that explain variation in these beliefs. Pentecostals, Baptist and Churches of Christ churchgoers, and people from the smallest Protestant denominations were less likely than other churchgoers to believe in anthropogenic climate change, and voting and hierarchical and individualistic views about society predicted beliefs. There was some evidence that these views function differently in relation to climate change beliefs depending on churchgoers’ degree of opposition to gay rights. These findings are of interest not only for the sake of international comparisons, but also in a context where Australia plays a role in international climate change politics that is disproportionate to its small population.
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International Nuclear Information System (INIS)
Caneill, J.Y.; Hakkarinen, C.
1992-01-01
An international consortium, called MECCA, (Model Evaluation Consortium for Climate Assessment) has been created in 1991 by different partners including electric utilities, government and academic groups to make available to the international scientific community, a super-computer facility for climate evolution studies. The first phase of the program consists to assess uncertainties of climate model simulations in the framework of global climate change studies. Fourteen scientific projects have been accepted on an international basis in this first phase. The second phase of the program will consist in the evaluation of a set of long climate simulations realized with coupled ocean/atmosphere models, in order to study the transient aspects of climate changes and the associated uncertainties. A particular attention will be devoted, on the consequences of these assessments on climate impact studies, and on the regional aspects of climate changes
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Nawrotzki, Raphael J.; Bakhtsiyarava, Maryia
2016-01-01
Research often assumes that, in rural areas of developing countries, adverse climatic conditions increase (climate driver mechanism) rather than reduce (climate inhibitor mechanism) migration, and that the impact of climate on migration is moderated by changes in agricultural productivity (agricultural pathway). Using representative census data in combination with high-resolution climate data derived from the novel Terra Populus system, we explore the climate-migration relationship in rural Burkina Faso and Senegal. We construct four threshold-based climate measures to investigate the effect of heat waves, cold snaps, droughts and excessive precipitation on the likelihood of household-level international outmigration. Results from multi-level logit models show that excessive precipitation increases international migration from Senegal while heat waves decrease international mobility in Burkina Faso, providing evidence for the climate inhibitor mechanism. Consistent with the agricultural pathway, interaction models and results from a geographically weighted regression (GWR) reveal a conditional effect of droughts on international outmigration from Senegal, which becomes stronger in areas with high levels of groundnut production. Moreover, climate change effects show a clear seasonal pattern, with the strongest effects appearing when heat waves overlap with the growing season and when excessive precipitation occurs prior to the growing season. PMID:28943813
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A New Tool for Climatic Analysis Using the Koppen Climate Classification
Larson, Paul R.; Lohrengel, C. Frederick, II
2011-01-01
The purpose of climate classification is to help make order of the seemingly endless spatial distribution of climates. The Koppen classification system in a modified format is the most widely applied system in use today. This system may not be the best nor most complete climate classification that can be conceived, but it has gained widespread…
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LINKING MICROBES TO CLIMATE: INCORPORATING MICROBIAL ACTIVITY INTO CLIMATE MODELS COLLOQUIUM
Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)
DeLong, Edward; Harwood, Caroline; Reid, Ann
2011-01-01
This report explains the connection between microbes and climate, discusses in general terms what modeling is and how it applied to climate, and discusses the need for knowledge in microbial physiology, evolution, and ecology to contribute to the determination of fluxes and rates in climate models. It recommends with a multi-pronged approach to address the gaps.
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The structure of the climate debate
International Nuclear Information System (INIS)
Tol, Richard S.J.
2017-01-01
First-best climate policy is a uniform carbon tax which gradually rises over time. Civil servants have complicated climate policy to expand bureaucracies, politicians to create rents. Environmentalists have exaggerated climate change to gain influence, other activists have joined the climate bandwagon. Opponents to climate policy have attacked the weaknesses in climate research. The climate debate is convoluted and polarized as a result, and climate policy complex. Climate policy should become easier and more rational as the Paris Agreement has shifted climate policy back towards national governments. Changing political priorities, austerity, and a maturing bureaucracy should lead to a more constructive climate debate. - Highlights: • Strong discrepancy between ideal and actual climate policy explained by incentives of policy-makers. • Paris Agreement allows for greater emphasis on national climate policies. • Shifting priorities and maturing bureaucracies allows climate policies to focus on greenhouse gas emission reduction.
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Marchal, V.; Dellink, R.; Vuuren, D.P. van; Clapp, C.; Chateau, J.; Magné, B.; Lanzi, E.; Vliet, J. van
2012-01-01
This chapter analyses the policy implications of the climate change challenge. Are current emission reduction pledges made in Copenhagen/Cancun enough to stabilise the climate and limit global average temperature increase to 2 oC? If not, what will the consequences be? What alternative growth
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Kirkby, Jasper
2007-01-01
Among the most puzzling questions in climate change is that of solar-climate variability, which has attracted the attention of scientists for more than two centuries. Until recently, even the existence of solar-climate variability has been controversialâperhaps because the observations had largely involved correlations between climate and the sunspot cycle that had persisted for only a few decades. Over the last few years, however, diverse reconstructions of past climate change have revealed clear associations with cosmic ray variations recorded in cosmogenic isotope archives, providing persuasive evidence for solar or cosmic ray forcing of the climate. However, despite the increasing evidence of its importance, solar-climate variability is likely to remain controversial until a physical mechanism is established. Although this remains a mystery, observations suggest that cloud cover may be influenced by cosmic rays, which are modulated by the solar wind and, on longer time scales, by the geomagnetic fiel...
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The human factor: climate change and climate communication
DEFF Research Database (Denmark)
Kjærgaard, Peter C.
2011-01-01
Reprint and translation of the article: “Den menneskelige faktor” published in the magazine Klima&Tilpasning Publisher: “Coordination unit for Research in Climate Change Adaptation” (KFT)......Reprint and translation of the article: “Den menneskelige faktor” published in the magazine Klima&Tilpasning Publisher: “Coordination unit for Research in Climate Change Adaptation” (KFT)...
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International Nuclear Information System (INIS)
Kaerner, Olavi
1999-01-01
Global warming is possible due to the increase of the greenhouse gases in the Earth's atmosphere. That circumstance, together with the general uncertainty about the exact definition of climate, enables politicians to give arbitrary interpretations of the time sequences collected on changes in temperatures, precipitations, etc., and thus, to intimidate people by predicting dire consequences. The paper explains some of the popular (mis)interpretations. The real effect on the contemporary climate caused by the increasing greenhouse gas reinforcement is still unknown owing to the complexity of the Earth's climatic system. Its modelling accuracy is still miserable. (author)
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Climatization: A critical perspective of framing disasters as climate change events
Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)
Stephen Grant
2015-01-01
The study found recent examples of climatization related to Cyclone Aila (2009 and salt water intrusion in Bangladesh. In most cases these disasters were climatized in order to create a sense of urgency in order to push for an increase in financial aid to Bangladesh and to deflect responsibility for inaction that led up to the disaster. This study urges caution as there is a potential for climatization to be used as a means to cover up negligence or bad management and there is a risk that by climatizing a disaster key vulnerabilities may be overlooked.
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Climate scenarios for California
Cayan, Daniel R.; Maurer, Ed; Dettinger, Mike; Tyree, Mary; Hayhoe, Katharine; Bonfils, Celine; Duffy, Phil; Santer, Ben
2006-01-01
Possible future climate changes in California are investigated from a varied set of climate change model simulations. These simulations, conducted by three state-of-the-art global climate models, provide trajectories from three greenhouse gas (GHG) emission scenarios. These scenarios and the resulting climate simulations are not “predictions,” but rather are a limited sample from among the many plausible pathways that may affect California’s climate. Future GHG concentrations are uncertain because they depend on future social, political, and technological pathways, and thus the IPCC has produced four “families” of emission scenarios. To explore some of these uncertainties, emissions scenarios A2 (a medium-high emissions) and B1 (low emissions) were selected from the current IPCC Fourth climate assessment, which provides several recent model simulations driven by A2 and B1 emissions. The global climate model simulations addressed here were from PCM1, the Parallel Climate Model from the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) group, and CM2.1 from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Geophysical Fluids Dynamics Laboratory (GFDL).
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International Nuclear Information System (INIS)
Bernier, Jean-Claude; Brasseur, Guy; Brechet, Yves; Candel, Sebastien; Cazenave, Anny; Courtillot, Vincent; Fontecave, Marc; Garnier, Emmanuel; Goebel, Philippe; Legrand, Jack; Legrand, Michel; Le Treut, Herve; Mauberger, Pascal; Dinh-Audouin, Minh-Thu; Olivier, Daniele; Rigny, Paul; Bigot, Bernard
2016-01-01
In its first part, this collective publication addresses the decennial and centuries-old variations of climate: perspectives and implications of climate change for the 21. century, questions remaining about the understanding of climate change from its sources to its modelling, extreme climate variations and societies during the last millennium. The contributions of the second part outline how chemistry is a tool to study climate change: ice chemistry as an archive of our past environment, observations and predictions on sea level rise, relationship between atmosphere chemistry and climate. The third set of contributions discusses the transformation of the energy system for a cleaner atmosphere and the management of the climate risk: the chemical processing of CO_2, actions of chemical companies to support the struggle against climate change, relationship between barrel price and renewable energies, relationship between grid complexity and green energy. The last part outlines the role chemistry can have to be able to do without fossil fuels: chemistry in front of challenges of transformation of the energy system, the use of micro-algae, the use of hydrogen as a vector of energy transition
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Using climate model simulations to assess the current climate risk to maize production
Kent, Chris; Pope, Edward; Thompson, Vikki; Lewis, Kirsty; Scaife, Adam A.; Dunstone, Nick
2017-05-01
The relationship between the climate and agricultural production is of considerable importance to global food security. However, there has been relatively little exploration of climate-variability related yield shocks. The short observational yield record does not adequately sample natural inter-annual variability thereby limiting the accuracy of probability assessments. Focusing on the United States and China, we present an innovative use of initialised ensemble climate simulations and a new agro-climatic indicator, to calculate the risk of severe water stress. Combined, these regions provide 60% of the world’s maize, and therefore, are crucial to global food security. To probe a greater range of inter-annual variability, the indicator is applied to 1400 simulations of the present day climate. The probability of severe water stress in the major maize producing regions is quantified, and in many regions an increased risk is found compared to calculations from observed historical data. Analysis suggests that the present day climate is also capable of producing unprecedented severe water stress conditions. Therefore, adaptation plans and policies based solely on observed events from the recent past may considerably under-estimate the true risk of climate-related maize shocks. The probability of a major impact event occurring simultaneously across both regions—a multi-breadbasket failure—is estimated to be up to 6% per decade and arises from a physically plausible climate state. This novel approach highlights the significance of climate impacts on crop production shocks and provides a platform for considerably improving food security assessments, in the present day or under a changing climate, as well as development of new risk based climate services.
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International Nuclear Information System (INIS)
Simonis, U.E.
1991-01-01
The effort of negotiate a global convention on climate change is one of mankind's great endeavours - and a challenge to economists and development planners. The inherent linkages between climate and the habitability of the earth are increasingly well recognized, and a convention could help to ensure that conserving the environment and developing the economy in the future must go hand in hand. Due to growing environmental concern the United Nations General Assembly has set into motion an international negotiating process for a framework convention on climate change. One the major tasks in these negotiations is how to share the duties in reducing climate relevant gases, particularly carbon dioxide (CO 2 ), between the industrial and the developing countries. The results and proposals could be among the most far-reaching ever for socio-economic development, indeed for global security and survival itself. While the negotiations will be about climate and protection of the atmosphere, they will be on fundamental global changes in energy policies, forestry, transport, technology, and on development pathways with low greenhouse gas emissions. Some of these aspects of a climate convention, particularly the distributional options and consequences for the North-South relations, are addressed in this chapter. (orig.)
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International Nuclear Information System (INIS)
2008-01-01
Businesses face much bigger climate change costs than they realise. That is the conclusion of Climate Changes Your Business. The climate change risks that companies should be paying more attention to are physical risks, regulatory risks as well as risk to reputation and the emerging risk of litigation, says the report. It argues that the risks associated with climate change tend to be underestimated
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International Nuclear Information System (INIS)
Beriot, Nicolas; Jouzel, Jean; Masson-Delmotte, Valerie; Braconnot, Pascale; Dufresne, Jean-Louis; Le Treut, Herve; Pachauri, Rajendra; Cazenave, Anny; Planton, Serge; Feral, Jean-Pierre
2013-01-01
Scientists and government delegations from around the world gathered in Stockholm (Sweden) in September 2013 to approve the first volume of the Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). This document reviews existing scientific knowledge on the Earth's climate. How was it prepared? How do scientists conduct research on climate change? What do they know for certain? What remains to be discovered?
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Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)
A Michelle Lawing
Full Text Available Mean annual temperature reported by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change increases at least 1.1°C to 6.4°C over the next 90 years. In context, a change in climate of 6°C is approximately the difference between the mean annual temperature of the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM and our current warm interglacial. Species have been responding to changing climate throughout Earth's history and their previous biological responses can inform our expectations for future climate change. Here we synthesize geological evidence in the form of stable oxygen isotopes, general circulation paleoclimate models, species' evolutionary relatedness, and species' geographic distributions. We use the stable oxygen isotope record to develop a series of temporally high-resolution paleoclimate reconstructions spanning the Middle Pleistocene to Recent, which we use to map ancestral climatic envelope reconstructions for North American rattlesnakes. A simple linear interpolation between current climate and a general circulation paleoclimate model of the LGM using stable oxygen isotope ratios provides good estimates of paleoclimate at other time periods. We use geologically informed rates of change derived from these reconstructions to predict magnitudes and rates of change in species' suitable habitat over the next century. Our approach to modeling the past suitable habitat of species is general and can be adopted by others. We use multiple lines of evidence of past climate (isotopes and climate models, phylogenetic topology (to correct the models for long-term changes in the suitable habitat of a species, and the fossil record, however sparse, to cross check the models. Our models indicate the annual rate of displacement in a clade of rattlesnakes over the next century will be 2 to 3 orders of magnitude greater (430-2,420 m/yr than it has been on average for the past 320 ky (2.3 m/yr.
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Lovejoy, S.; Schertzer, D.
2009-04-01
Although meteorology and climatology are increasingly considered to be distinct sciences, the actual boundary between "climate scales" and "meteorological scales" is not clear and there are no universally accepted definitions. It is still hard to improve upon the old adage "the climate is what you expect, the weather is what you get". For example [Committee on Radiative Forcing Effects on Climate, 2005], the National Academy of Science essentially accepts this ("Climate is conventionally defined as the long-term statistics of the weather") proposing only to expand the definition of climate to encompass the oceanic and terrestrial spheres as well as chemical components of the atmosphere. However the weather itself has nontrivial statistics so that the key weather/climate distinction depend on apparently subjective distinction between long-term and short-term statistics. In this talk, we give an objective basis to the weather/climate distinction with the help of an anisotropic space-time turbulence theory and both lidar satellite radiances, in situ spectra and numerical models of the atmosphere and reanalyses. We show that the latter accurately follow the predictions of multiplicative cascade models up to about 7-10 days. This marks the beginning of a weather/climate transition region which extends up to the cascade outer scale of about 20-30 days (depending somewhat on the atmospheric field), after which the climate regime begins. We bolster this interpretation by empirically constructing space-time (Stommel) diagrammes; we obtain near linear relations between time and (horizontal) space and theoretically predicted power law relations between the vertical and time up until the end of the weather regime (~10000 km in the horizontal, ~10 km in the vertical, ~10 days in time). We discuss the implications for weather, climate and climate trends.
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Competencies Framework for Climate Services.
Aguilar, Enric
2016-04-01
The World Climate Conference-3 (Geneva, 2009) established the Global Framework for Climate Services (GFCS) to enable better management of the risks of climate variability and change and adaptation to climate change at all levels, through development and incorporation of science-based climate information and prediction into planning, policy and practice. The GFCS defines Climate Services as the result of transforming climate data into climate information in a way that responds to user needs and assists decision-making by individuals and organizations. Capacity Development is a cross-cutting pillar of the GFCS to ensure that services are provided by institutions with professionals whom achieved the adequate set of competencies recommended by WMO, which are yet to be fully defined. The WMO-Commission for Climatology Expert Team on Education and Training, ET-ETR, has been working to define a Competencies Framework for Climate Services to help the institutions to deliver high quality climate services in compliance with WMO standards and regulations, specifically those defined by WMO's Commission for Climatology and the GFCS. This framework is based in 5 areas or competence, closely associated to the areas of work of climate services providers: create and manage climate data sets; derive products from climate data; create and/or interpret climate forecasts and model output; ensure the quality of climate information and services; communicate climatological information with users. With this contribution, we intend to introduce to a wider audience the rationale behind these 5 top-level competency statements and the performance criteria associated with them, as well as the plans of the ET-ETR for further developing them into an instrument to support education and training within the WMO members, specially the National Meteorological and Hydrological Services.
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NASA Climate Days: Promoting Climate Literacy One Ambassador and One Event at a Time
Weir, H. M.; Lewis, P. M.; Chambers, L. H.; Millham, R. A.; Richardson, A.
2012-12-01
With so many informal outreach and education venues across the world, leveraging them for climate education allows vast amounts of information to be translated to the public in a familiar setting through trusted local sources. One of the challenges is the development of an effective process for training informal educators and providing them with adequate support materials. The 'NASA Climate Day Kit', and its related training strategy for Earth Ambassadors, is designed to address some of these issues. The purpose of the NASA Climate Day project is to collect existing NASA climate education materials, assemble a cadre of informal educators, and provide professional development on the subject of climate change. This training is accomplished through a series of exercises, games, science talks and place-based training. After their training and immersion in climate-related content, participants develop and implement a climate event at their local informal education venue. Throughout their training the Earth Ambassadors are exposed to a wide array of climate related exercises and background content. Some of these include one-on-one science content talks with NASA scientists who study climate on a daily basis. This allows the Ambassador to have direct access to new cutting edge data and information. To complement the science talks, participants explore activities and games that can engage all ages at their climate event. During their training, they also explore the 'Climate Day Kit'. This Kit is an assemblage of climate-related materials created by various NASA groups. Key components of this Kit include data visualizations, articles, electronic reference material, science talks, NASA Education and Public Outreach (E/PO) climate materials, and examples of Climate Day events that have been conducted in the past. As an on-going resource and to use for their own climate event, each group of Earth Ambassadors has access to a dynamic website that hosts all of the science
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Climate and climate-related issues for the safety assessment SR-Can
International Nuclear Information System (INIS)
Naeslund, Jens-Ove
2006-11-01
The purpose of this report is to document current scientific knowledge of the climate-related conditions and processes relevant to the long-term safety of a KBS-3 repository to a level required for an adequate treatment in the safety assessment SR-Can. The report also includes a concise background description of the climate system. The report includes three main chapters: A description of the climate system (Chapter 2); Identification and discussion of climate-related issues (Chapter 3); and, A description of the evolution of climate-related conditions for the safety assessment (Chapter 4). Chapter 2 includes an overview of present knowledge of the Earth climate system and the climate conditions that can be expected to occur in Sweden on a 100,000 year time perspective. Based on this, climate-related issues relevant for the long-term safety of a KBS-3 repository are identified. These are documented in Chapter 3 'Climate-related issues' to a level required for an adequate treatment in the safety assessment. Finally, in Chapter 4, 'Evolution of climate-related conditions for the safety assessment' an evolution for a 120,000 year period is presented, including discussions of identified climate-related issues of importance for repository safety. The documentation is from a scientific point of view not exhaustive, since such a treatment is neither necessary for the purposes of the safety assessment nor possible within the scope of a safety assessment. As further described in the SR-Can Main Report and in the Features Events and Processes report, the content of the present report has been audited by comparison with FEP databases compiled in other assessment projects. This report follows as far as possible the template for documentation of processes regarded as internal to the repository system. However, the term processes is not used in this report, instead the term issue has been used. Each issue includes a set of processes together resulting in the behaviour of a
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Climate and climate-related issues for the safety assessment SR-Can
Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)
Naeslund, Jens-Ove (comp.)
2006-11-15
The purpose of this report is to document current scientific knowledge of the climate-related conditions and processes relevant to the long-term safety of a KBS-3 repository to a level required for an adequate treatment in the safety assessment SR-Can. The report also includes a concise background description of the climate system. The report includes three main chapters: A description of the climate system (Chapter 2); Identification and discussion of climate-related issues (Chapter 3); and, A description of the evolution of climate-related conditions for the safety assessment (Chapter 4). Chapter 2 includes an overview of present knowledge of the Earth climate system and the climate conditions that can be expected to occur in Sweden on a 100,000 year time perspective. Based on this, climate-related issues relevant for the long-term safety of a KBS-3 repository are identified. These are documented in Chapter 3 'Climate-related issues' to a level required for an adequate treatment in the safety assessment. Finally, in Chapter 4, 'Evolution of climate-related conditions for the safety assessment' an evolution for a 120,000 year period is presented, including discussions of identified climate-related issues of importance for repository safety. The documentation is from a scientific point of view not exhaustive, since such a treatment is neither necessary for the purposes of the safety assessment nor possible within the scope of a safety assessment. As further described in the SR-Can Main Report and in the Features Events and Processes report, the content of the present report has been audited by comparison with FEP databases compiled in other assessment projects. This report follows as far as possible the template for documentation of processes regarded as internal to the repository system. However, the term processes is not used in this report, instead the term issue has been used. Each issue includes a set of processes together resulting in the
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The role of internal climate variability for interpreting climate change scenarios
Maraun, Douglas
2013-04-01
When communicating information on climate change, the use of multi-model ensembles has been advocated to sample uncertainties over a range as wide as possible. To meet the demand for easily accessible results, the ensemble is often summarised by its multi-model mean signal. In rare cases, additional uncertainty measures are given to avoid loosing all information on the ensemble spread, e.g., the highest and lowest projected values. Such approaches, however, disregard the fundamentally different nature of the different types of uncertainties and might cause wrong interpretations and subsequently wrong decisions for adaptation. Whereas scenario and climate model uncertainties are of epistemic nature, i.e., caused by an in principle reducible lack of knowledge, uncertainties due to internal climate variability are aleatory, i.e., inherently stochastic and irreducible. As wisely stated in the proverb "climate is what you expect, weather is what you get", a specific region will experience one stochastic realisation of the climate system, but never exactly the expected climate change signal as given by a multi model mean. Depending on the meteorological variable, region and lead time, the signal might be strong or weak compared to the stochastic component. In cases of a low signal-to-noise ratio, even if the climate change signal is a well defined trend, no trends or even opposite trends might be experienced. Here I propose to use the time of emergence (TOE) to quantify and communicate when climate change trends will exceed the internal variability. The TOE provides a useful measure for end users to assess the time horizon for implementing adaptation measures. Furthermore, internal variability is scale dependent - the more local the scale, the stronger the influence of internal climate variability. Thus investigating the TOE as a function of spatial scale could help to assess the required spatial scale for implementing adaptation measures. I exemplify this proposal with
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Climate indices for vulnerability assessments
Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)
Persson, Gunn; Baerring, Lars; Kjellstroem, Erik; Strandberg, Gustav; Rummuk ainen, Markku
2007-08-15
The demand is growing for practical information on climate projections and the impacts expected in different geographical regions and different sectors. It is a challenge to transform the vast amount of data produced in climate models into relevant information for climate change impact studies. Climate indices based on climate model data can be used as means to communicate climate change impact relations. In this report a vast amount of results is presented from a multitude of indices based on different regional climate scenarios. The regional climate scenarios described in this report show many similarities with previous scenarios in terms of general evolution and amplitude of future European climate change. The broad features are manifested in increases in warm and decreases in cold indices. Likewise are presented increases in wet indices in the north and dry indices in the south. Despite the extensive nature of the material presented, it does not cover the full range of possible climate change. We foresee a continued interactive process with stakeholders as well as continued efforts and updates of the results presented in the report.
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Expected impacts of climate change on extreme climate events
International Nuclear Information System (INIS)
Planton, S.; Deque, M.; Chauvin, F.; Terray, L.
2008-01-01
An overview of the expected change of climate extremes during this century due to greenhouse gases and aerosol anthropogenic emissions is presented. The most commonly used methodologies rely on the dynamical or statistical down-scaling of climate projections, performed with coupled atmosphere-ocean general circulation models. Either of dynamical or of statistical type, down-scaling methods present strengths and weaknesses, but neither their validation on present climate conditions, nor their potential ability to project the impact of climate change on extreme event statistics allows one to give a specific advantage to one of the two types. The results synthesized in the last IPCC report and more recent studies underline a convergence for a very likely increase in heat wave episodes over land surfaces, linked to the mean warming and the increase in temperature variability. In addition, the number of days of frost should decrease and the growing season length should increase. The projected increase in heavy precipitation events appears also as very likely over most areas and also seems linked to a change in the shape of the precipitation intensity distribution. The global trends for drought duration are less consistent between models and down-scaling methodologies, due to their regional variability. The change of wind-related extremes is also regionally dependent, and associated to a poleward displacement of the mid-latitude storm tracks. The specific study of extreme events over France reveals the high sensitivity of some statistics of climate extremes at the decadal time scale as a consequence of regional climate internal variability. (authors)
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International Nuclear Information System (INIS)
Simon, Marie; Blanc, Dominique; Husson-Traore, Anne-Catherine; Amiell, Alison; Barochez, Aurelie de; Conti, Sophie; Kamelgarn, Yona; Bonnet, Olivier; Braman, Stuart; Chenet, Hugues; Fisher, Remco; Hellier, Mickael; Horster, Maximilian; Kindelbacher, Sophie; Leaton, James; Lieblich, Sebastien; Neuneyer, Dustin; Lenoel, Benjamin; Smart, Lauren; Torklep Meisingset, Christine
2015-02-01
Some investors are willing to lower the carbon emission financed by their investment, recognizing that climate change has financial impacts. At first they measure the carbon footprint of their portfolio, than initiate shareholder engagement actions at oil and gas companies, publish list of exclusion composed of the most carbon-intensive companies and ask for ex fossil fuels indices. In June 2015, Novethic launches the first actualisation of its study released on February 2015 on the mobilisation of investors on climate change over the whole 2015 year. The trend is gaining momentum since more than 200 additional investors publicly disclosed commitments to integrate climate risk into their investment and management practices. In September 2015, for its second update of the report on how investors are taking action on climate change, more than 800 entities were screened. As a key result, investor's actions gain momentum: approaches are growing in number and becoming more expert, divestments are widespread in Europe, and green investments promises are more ambitious. The last edition of November 2015 highlights and scans an exclusive panel of 960 investors worth Euro 30 trillion of assets who have made steps forward to tackle climate change. During the last 8 months, their number has almost increased twofold. This document brings together the first edition of Novethic's study and its three updates
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Climatic projections and socio economic impacts of the climatic change in Colombia
International Nuclear Information System (INIS)
Eslava R, Jesus Antonio; Pabon Caicedo, Jose Daniel
2001-01-01
For the task of working out climate change projections, different methodologies have been in use, from simple extrapolations to sophisticated statistical and mathematical tools. Today, the tools most used are the models of the general circulation of the atmosphere and ocean, which include many processes of other climate components (biosphere, cryosphere, continental surface models, etc.). Different global and regional scenarios have been generated with those models. They may be of great utility in calculating projections and future scenarios for Colombia, but the representation of the country's climate in those models has to be improved in order to get projections with a higher level of certainty. The application of climate models and of the techniques of down scaling in studies of climate change is new both in Colombia and tropical America, and was introduced through the National University of Colombia's project on local and national climate change. In the first phase of the project, version 3 of the CCM (Climate Community Model) of NCAR was implemented. Parallel to that, and based on national (grid) data, maps have been prepared of the monthly temperature and precipitation of Colombia, which were used to validate the model
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The Global Climate Dashboard: a Software Interface to Stream Comprehensive Climate Data
Gardiner, N.; Phillips, M.; NOAA Climate Portal Dashboard
2011-12-01
The Global Climate Dashboard is an integral component of NOAA's web portal to climate data, services, and value-added content for decision-makers, teachers, and the science-attentive public (www.clmate.gov). The dashboard provides a rapid view of observational data that demonstrate climate change and variability, as well as outputs from the Climate Model Intercomparison Project version 3, which was built to support the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change fourth assessment. The data shown in the dashboard therefore span a range of climate science disciplines with applications that serve audiences with diverse needs. The dashboard is designed with reusable software components that allow it to be implemented incrementally on a wide range of platforms including desktops, tablet devices, and mobile phones. The underlying software components support live streaming of data and provide a way of encapsulating graph sytles and other presentation details into a device-independent standard format that results in a common visual look and feel across all platforms. Here we describe the pedagogical objectives, technical implementation, and the deployment of the dashboard through climate.gov and partner web sites and describe plans to develop a mobile application using the same framework.
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Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)
Houet, Thomas, E-mail: thomas.houet@univ-tlse2.fr [GEODE UMR 5602 CNRS, Universite de Toulouse, 5 allee Antonio Machado, 31058 Toulouse Cedex (France); Pigeon, Gregoire [Centre National de Recherches Meteorologiques, Meteo-France/CNRM-GAME, 42 avenue Coriolis, 31057 Toulouse Cedex (France)
2011-08-15
Facing the concern of the population to its environment and to climatic change, city planners are now considering the urban climate in their choices of planning. The use of climatic maps, such Urban Climate Zone-UCZ, is adapted for this kind of application. The objective of this paper is to demonstrate that the UCZ classification, integrated in the World Meteorological Organization guidelines, first can be automatically determined for sample areas and second is meaningful according to climatic variables. The analysis presented is applied on Toulouse urban area (France). Results show first that UCZ differentiate according to air and surface temperature. It has been possible to determine the membership of sample areas to an UCZ using landscape descriptors automatically computed with GIS and remote sensed data. It also emphasizes that climate behavior and magnitude of UCZ may vary from winter to summer. Finally we discuss the influence of climate data and scale of observation on UCZ mapping and climate characterization. - Highlights: > We proposed a method to map Urban Climate Zones and quantify their climate behaviors. > UCZ is an expert-based classification and is integrated in the WMO guidelines. > We classified 26 sample areas and quantified climate behaviors in winter/summer. > Results enhance urban heat islands and outskirts are surprisingly hottest in summer. > Influence of scale and climate data on UCZ mapping and climate evaluation is discussed. - This paper presents an automated approach to classify sample areas in a UCZ using landscape descriptors and demonstrate that climate behaviors of UCZ differ.
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Health Aspects of Climate Change in Cities with Mediterranean Climate, and Local Adaptation Plans.
Paz, Shlomit; Negev, Maya; Clermont, Alexandra; Green, Manfred S
2016-04-21
Cities with a Mediterranean-type climate (Med-cities) are particularly susceptible to health risks from climate change since they are located in biogeographical hot-spots that experience some of the strongest effects of the changing climate. The study aims to highlight health impacts of climate change in Med-cities, analyze local climate adaptation plans and make adaptation policy recommendations for the Med-city level. We identified five Med-cities with a climate change adaptation plan: Adelaide, Barcelona, Cape Town, Los Angeles and Santiago. Beyond their similar Med-climate features (although Santiago's are slightly different), the cities have different socio-economic characteristics in various aspects. We analyzed each plan according to how it addresses climate change-related drivers of health impacts among city dwellers. For each driver, we identified the types of policy adaptation tools that address it in the urban climate adaptation plans. The surveyed cities address most of the fundamental climate change-related drivers of risks to human health, including rising temperatures, flooding and drought, but the policy measures to reduce negative impacts vary across cities. We suggest recommendations for Med-cities in various aspects, depending on their local needs and vulnerability challenges: assessment of health risks, extreme events management and long-term adaptation, among others.
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Climate prosperity, parallel paths: Canada-U.S. climate policy choices
International Nuclear Information System (INIS)
2011-01-01
The National Round Table on the Environment and the Economy (NRTEE) has conducted a study on the economic risks and opportunities of climate policies for Canada in the Canada-United States relationship background. This research aims to inform future policy decisions and provide ideas on means to serve Canadian interests in the context of this climate changing world. The NRTEE's research presented in this report focuses on the economic and environmental implications for Canada of harmonizing with the U.S. on climate policy. The document follows two main objectives: evaluate the consequences of U.S. climate policy choices for Canada and identify the policy options that would lead to a long-term reduction of emissions, taking into account the economic risks associated to policy choices in the U.S. and in Canada. According to the NRTEE, the government of Canada should take under consideration the benefits of the implementation of its own strategy for harmonization. This document provides a path leading to the achievement of a climate policy harmonization with the United States. 52 refs., 18 tabs., 24 figs.
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Climate change and forest diseases
R.N. Sturrock; Susan Frankel; A. V. Brown; Paul Hennon; J. T. Kliejunas; K. J. Lewis; J. J. Worrall; A. J. Woods
2011-01-01
As climate changes, the effects of forest diseases on forest ecosystems will change. We review knowledge of relationships between climate variables and several forest diseases, as well as current evidence of how climate, host and pathogen interactions are responding or might respond to climate change. Many forests can be managed to both adapt to climate change and...
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Mysiak, Jaroslav; Torresan, Silvia; Bosello, Francesco; Mistry, Malcolm; Amadio, Mattia; Marzi, Sepehr; Furlan, Elisa; Sperotto, Anna
2018-06-01
We describe a climate risk index that has been developed to inform national climate adaptation planning in Italy and that is further elaborated in this paper. The index supports national authorities in designing adaptation policies and plans, guides the initial problem formulation phase, and identifies administrative areas with higher propensity to being adversely affected by climate change. The index combines (i) climate change-amplified hazards; (ii) high-resolution indicators of exposure of chosen economic, social, natural and built- or manufactured capital (MC) assets and (iii) vulnerability, which comprises both present sensitivity to climate-induced hazards and adaptive capacity. We use standardized anomalies of selected extreme climate indices derived from high-resolution regional climate model simulations of the EURO-CORDEX initiative as proxies of climate change-altered weather and climate-related hazards. The exposure and sensitivity assessment is based on indicators of manufactured, natural, social and economic capital assets exposed to and adversely affected by climate-related hazards. The MC refers to material goods or fixed assets which support the production process (e.g. industrial machines and buildings); Natural Capital comprises natural resources and processes (renewable and non-renewable) producing goods and services for well-being; Social Capital (SC) addressed factors at the individual (people's health, knowledge, skills) and collective (institutional) level (e.g. families, communities, organizations and schools); and Economic Capital (EC) includes owned and traded goods and services. The results of the climate risk analysis are used to rank the subnational administrative and statistical units according to the climate risk challenges, and possibly for financial resource allocation for climate adaptation. This article is part of the theme issue `Advances in risk assessment for climate change adaptation policy'.
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Visualizing interconnections among climate risks
Tanaka, K.; Yokohata, T.; Nishina, K.; Takahashi, K.; Emori, S.; Kiguchi, M.; Iseri, Y.; Honda, Y.; Okada, M.; Masaki, Y.; Yamamoto, A.; Shigemitsu, M.; Yoshimori, M.; Sueyoshi, T.; Hanasaki, N.; Ito, A.; Sakurai, G.; Iizumi, T.; Nishimori, M.; Lim, W. H.; Miyazaki, C.; Kanae, S.; Oki, T.
2015-12-01
It is now widely recognized that climate change is affecting various sectors of the world. Climate change impact on one sector may spread out to other sectors including those seemingly remote, which we call "interconnections of climate risks". While a number of climate risks have been identified in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fifth Assessment Report (AR5), there has been no attempt to explore their interconnections comprehensively. Here we present a first and most exhaustive visualization of climate risks drawn based on a systematic literature survey. Our risk network diagrams depict that changes in the climate system impact natural capitals (terrestrial water, crop, and agricultural land) as well as social infrastructures, influencing the socio-economic system and ultimately our access to food, water, and energy. Our findings suggest the importance of incorporating climate risk interconnections into impact and vulnerability assessments and call into question the widely used damage function approaches, which address a limited number of climate change impacts in isolation. Furthermore, the diagram is useful to educate decision makers, stakeholders, and general public about cascading risks that can be triggered by the climate change. Socio-economic activities today are becoming increasingly more inter-dependent because of the rapid technological progress, urbanization, and the globalization among others. Equally complex is the ecosystem that is susceptible to climate change, which comprises interwoven processes affecting one another. In the context of climate change, a number of climate risks have been identified and classified according to regions and sectors. These reports, however, did not fully address the inter-relations among risks because of the complexity inherent in this issue. Climate risks may ripple through sectors in the present inter-dependent world, posing a challenge ahead of us to maintain the resilience of the system. It is
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Climate and Non-Climate Drivers of Dengue Epidemics in Southern Coastal Ecuador
Stewart-Ibarra, Anna M.; Lowe, Rachel
2013-01-01
We report a statistical mixed model for assessing the importance of climate and non-climate drivers of interannual variability in dengue fever in southern coastal Ecuador. Local climate data and Pacific sea surface temperatures (Oceanic Niño Index [ONI]) were used to predict dengue standardized morbidity ratios (SMRs; 1995–2010). Unobserved confounding factors were accounted for using non-structured yearly random effects. We found that ONI, rainfall, and minimum temperature were positively associated with dengue, with more cases of dengue during El Niño events. We assessed the influence of non-climatic factors on dengue SMR using a subset of data (2001–2010) and found that the percent of households with Aedes aegypti immatures was also a significant predictor. Our results indicate that monitoring the climate and non-climate drivers identified in this study could provide some predictive lead for forecasting dengue epidemics, showing the potential to develop a dengue early-warning system in this region. PMID:23478584
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Inconsistencies at the interface of climate impact studies and global climate research
International Nuclear Information System (INIS)
Storch, H. von.
1994-01-01
Most climate impacts studies, whether they deal with, for instance, terristric or marine ecosystems, coastal morphodynamics, storm surges and damages, or socio-economic aspects, utilize ''scenarios'' of possible future climate. Such scenarios are always based on the output of complex mathematical climate models, whenever they are in any sense detailed. Unfortunately, the user community of such scenarios usually is not well informed about the limitations and potentials of such models. On the other hand, the climate modeller community is not sufficiently aware of the demands on the side of the ''users''. The state of the art of climate models is revieved and the principal limitations concerning the spatial/time resolution and the accuracy of simulated data are discussed. The need for a ''downscaling strategy'' on the climate modeller side and for an ''upscaling'' strategy on the user side is demonstrated. Examples for successful exercieses in downscaling seasonal mean precipitation and daily rainfall sequences are shown. (orig.)
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Climate Leadership Awards Frequent Questions
Provides answers to frequently asked questions regarding the Climate Leadership Awards, sponsored by EPA's Center for Corporate Climate Leadership with co-sponsorship from the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions and The Climate Registry.
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A climate for development. Climate change policy options for Africa
International Nuclear Information System (INIS)
Okoth-Ogendo, H.W.O.; Ojwang, J.B.
1995-01-01
The seriousness of the potential impacts of climate change on development in Africa is now well recognized within, and increasingly outside, scientific circles. The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change is a landmark in international environmental governance, providing a mechanism for exchange, negotiation and institution-building to re-direct development towards more efficient use of resources, especially energy. The message of 'A climate for Development' is that unless policy-makers fully understand both the international commitments made under the Convention and the essential national development priorities of their own countries, effective action on climate change is unlikely to be realized. The action needed, however, can at the same time stimulate capacity-building, planning and policy change which would strengthen the economic and ecological base of African countries. The climate change issue has hence brought us face to face with the urgency of the basic issues of sustainable development in Africa. The book discusses key issues that cut across all African countries, such as emissions and their impacts, financial resources and technology transfer for emissions abatement strategies. It then provides a sectoral analysis of greenhouse gas emissions and abatement options focusing on energy, industry, agriculture, forestry and transportation. The book concludes with guidelines for options which may be considered by African countries to ensure that climate change concerns are effectively dealt with in the context of their development priorities. 113 refs
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Climate change and skin disease.
Lundgren, Ashley D
2018-04-01
Despite commanding essentially universal scientific consensus, climate change remains a divisive and poorly understood topic in the United States. Familiarity with this subject is not just for climate scientists. The impact of climate change on human morbidity and mortality may be considerable; thus, physicians also should be knowledgeable in this realm. Climate change science can seem opaque and inferential, creating fertile ground for political polemics and undoubtedly contributing to confusion among the general public. This puts physicians in a pivotal position to facilitate a practical understanding of climate change in the public sphere by discussing changes in disease patterns and their possible relationship to a changing climate. This article provides a background on climate change for dermatologists and highlights how climate change may impact the management of skin disease across the United States.
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Climate change projections for Greek viticulture as simulated by a regional climate model
Lazoglou, Georgia; Anagnostopoulou, Christina; Koundouras, Stefanos
2017-07-01
Viticulture represents an important economic activity for Greek agriculture. Winegrapes are cultivated in many areas covering the whole Greek territory, due to the favorable soil and climatic conditions. Given the dependence of viticulture on climate, the vitivinicultural sector is expected to be affected by possible climatic changes. The present study is set out to investigate the impacts of climatic change in Greek viticulture, using nine bioclimatic indices for the period 1981-2100. For this purpose, reanalysis data from the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) and data from the regional climatic model Regional Climate Model Version 3 (RegCM3) are used. It was found that the examined regional climate model estimates satisfactorily these bioclimatic indices. The results of the study show that the increasing trend of temperature and drought will affect all wine-producing regions in Greece. In vineyards in mountainous regions, the impact is positive, while in islands and coastal regions, it is negative. Overall, it should be highlighted that for the first time that Greece is classified into common climatic characteristic categories, according to the international Geoviticulture Multicriteria Climatic Classification System (MCC system). According to the proposed classification, Greek viticulture regions are estimated to have similar climatic characteristics with the warmer wine-producing regions of the world up to the end of twenty-first century. Wine growers and winemakers should take the findings of the study under consideration in order to take measures for Greek wine sector adaptation and the continuation of high-quality wine production.
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Climate Leadership webinar on Integrating Energy and Climate Risk Management
Allergan, a multi-specialty healthcare company and pharmaceutical manufacturer, discusses how it manages climate and energy risks, how these areas are linked, and how energy and climate management strategies pervade critical business decisions.
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Millennium goals and Climate-Change negotiations for a climate and development convergence mechanism
International Nuclear Information System (INIS)
Mathy, Sandrine
2014-10-01
In 2015 two major international events will coincide: the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Paris and negotiations on a new set of Millennium Development Goals for 2030, including measures to combat poverty. Until now these two dossiers have mainly been treated separately, but the stakes for development and the measures required to avoid unbridled climate change are inextricably linked, particularly in developing countries. In the build-up to the 2015 Paris Climate Conference, this article presents a proposal which seeks to reconcile development strategies with policies on climate change and adaptation, by promoting various forms of synergy between these two fields, in such a way as to make satisfying basic needs an absolute priority and to clear up the dispute between industrialized and developing countries regarding the latter's commitment to combating climate change. Our Climate and Development Convergence Mechanism advocates an approach based on voluntary, sector-based, flexible participation enabled by output-based aid and indicators of the satisfaction of basic needs. The Climate and Development Convergence Mechanism could, in a single move, overcome several stumbling blocks within ongoing climate negotiations on climate change between developed and developing countries. First it could respond to the concerns of developing countries which do not accept constraints on their development on the grounds of combating climate change. On the contrary the mechanism represents a form of incentive to achieve convergence between development priorities, particularly poverty alleviation and satisfaction of several basic needs and the equally necessary efforts to cut greenhouse gas emissions, while developing in climate-change resilient ways. Second, if developing countries accepted the mechanism, industrialized countries could no longer maintain their current stance, demanding a formal commitment on emissions reduction. The potential of the mechanism relies on
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Geethalakshmi, V.; Bhuvaneshwari, K.; Lakshmanan, A.
2011-01-01
This Technical brief summarizes some of the studies conducted on rice using a climate control chamber and outlines the studies that will be undertaken in the Climate Control Chamber facility that has been established at the Agro Climate Research Center at Tamil Nadu Agricultural University, Coimbatore. In recent years a numbers of technologies have been developed to study the impact of climate change on agricultural systems. Crop response to climate change could be studied by using a climate ...
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Goldman, G. T.; Carlson, C.
2014-12-01
To enact effective policies to address climate change, decision makers need both scientific and political support. One major barrier to U.S. climate policy enactment has been the opposition of private sector actors to proposed policies and to climate science itself. Increasingly, the public and investors are holding companies accountable for their actions around climate change—including political activies, affiliations with trade groups, and involvement with climate science. However, this accountability is inhibited by the prominent role that trade associations have played in climate policy debates in recent years. The opaque nature of such groups is problematic, as it inhibits the public from understanding who is obstructing progress on addressing climate change, and in some cases, impedes the public's climate literacy. Voluntary climate reporting can yield some information on companies' climate engagement and demonstrates the need for greater transparency in corporate political activities around climate change. We analyze CDP climate reporting data from 1,824 companies to assess the degree to which corporate actors disclosed their political influence on climate policies through their trade associations. Results demonstrate the limitations of voluntary reporting and the extent to which companies utilize their trade associations to influence climate change policy debates without being held accountable for these positions. Notably, many companies failed to acknowledge their board seat on trade groups with significant climate policy engagement. Of those that did acknowledge their board membership, some claimed not to agree with their trade associations' positions on climate change. These results raise questions about who trade groups are representing when they challenge the science or obstruct policies to address climate change. Recommendations for overcoming this barrier to informed decision making to address climate change will be discussed.
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National Aeronautics and Space Administration — CLAIRE MONTELEONI*, GAVIN SCHMIDT, AND SHAILESH SAROHA* Climate models are complex mathematical models designed by meteorologists, geophysicists, and climate...
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Climate analysis at local scale in the context of climate change
International Nuclear Information System (INIS)
Quenol, H.
2013-01-01
Issues related to climate change increasingly concern the functioning of local scale geo-systems. A global change will necessarily affect local climates. In this context, the potential impacts of climate change lead to numerous inter rogations concerning adaptation. Despite numerous studies on the impact of projected global warming on different regions global atmospheric models (GCM) are not adapted to local scales and, as a result, impacts at local scales are still approximate. Although real progress in meso-scale atmospheric modeling was realized over the past years, no operative model is in use yet to simulate climate at local scales (ten or so meters). (author)
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Using Weather Data and Climate Model Output in Economic Analyses of Climate Change
Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)
Auffhammer, M.; Hsiang, S. M.; Schlenker, W.; Sobel, A.
2013-06-28
Economists are increasingly using weather data and climate model output in analyses of the economic impacts of climate change. This article introduces a set of weather data sets and climate models that are frequently used, discusses the most common mistakes economists make in using these products, and identifies ways to avoid these pitfalls. We first provide an introduction to weather data, including a summary of the types of datasets available, and then discuss five common pitfalls that empirical researchers should be aware of when using historical weather data as explanatory variables in econometric applications. We then provide a brief overview of climate models and discuss two common and significant errors often made by economists when climate model output is used to simulate the future impacts of climate change on an economic outcome of interest.
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Vegetation-climate feedbacks modulate rainfall patterns in Africa under future climate change
Wu, Minchao; Schurgers, Guy; Rummukainen, Markku; Smith, Benjamin; Samuelsson, Patrick; Jansson, Christer; Siltberg, Joe; May, Wilhelm
2016-07-01
Africa has been undergoing significant changes in climate and vegetation in recent decades, and continued changes may be expected over this century. Vegetation cover and composition impose important influences on the regional climate in Africa. Climate-driven changes in vegetation structure and the distribution of forests versus savannah and grassland may feed back to climate via shifts in the surface energy balance, hydrological cycle and resultant effects on surface pressure and larger-scale atmospheric circulation. We used a regional Earth system model incorporating interactive vegetation-atmosphere coupling to investigate the potential role of vegetation-mediated biophysical feedbacks on climate dynamics in Africa in an RCP8.5-based future climate scenario. The model was applied at high resolution (0.44 × 0.44°) for the CORDEX-Africa domain with boundary conditions from the CanESM2 general circulation model. We found that increased tree cover and leaf-area index (LAI) associated with a CO2 and climate-driven increase in net primary productivity, particularly over subtropical savannah areas, not only imposed important local effect on the regional climate by altering surface energy fluxes but also resulted in remote effects over central Africa by modulating the land-ocean temperature contrast, Atlantic Walker circulation and moisture inflow feeding the central African tropical rainforest region with precipitation. The vegetation-mediated feedbacks were in general negative with respect to temperature, dampening the warming trend simulated in the absence of feedbacks, and positive with respect to precipitation, enhancing rainfall reduction over the rainforest areas. Our results highlight the importance of accounting for vegetation-atmosphere interactions in climate projections for tropical and subtropical Africa.
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Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)
Lindzen, Richard [M.I.T.
2011-11-09
Warming observed thus far is entirely consistent with low climate sensitivity. However, the result is ambiguous because the sources of climate change are numerous and poorly specified. Model predictions of substantial warming aredependent on positive feedbacks associated with upper level water vapor and clouds, but models are notably inadequate in dealing with clouds and the impacts of clouds and water vapor are intimately intertwined. Various approaches to measuring sensitivity based on the physics of the feedbacks will be described. The results thus far point to negative feedbacks. Problems with these approaches as well as problems with the concept of climate sensitivity will be described.
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Fat-tailed risk about climate change and climate policy
International Nuclear Information System (INIS)
Hwang, In Chang; Tol, Richard S.J.; Hofkes, Marjan W.
2016-01-01
This paper investigates the role of emissions control in welfare maximization under fat-tailed risk about climate change. We provide a classification of fat tails and discuss the effect of fat-tailed risk on climate policy. One of the main findings is that emissions control may prevent the “strong” tail-effect from arising, at least under some conditions such as bounded temperature increases, low risk aversion, low damage costs, and bounded utility function. More specifically, the fat-tailed risk with respect to a climate parameter does not necessarily lead to an unbounded carbon tax. In this case, the basic principle of cost-benefit analysis maintains its applicability. - Highlights: • A fat tail is classified and the tail effect on climate policy is discussed. • The optimal carbon tax is not necessarily unbounded. • The basic principle of cost-benefit analysis maintains its applicability. • This is a numerical confirmation of the recent theoretical research.
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Duffy, P. B.; Colohan, P.; Driggers, R.; Herring, D.; Laurier, F.; Petes, L.; Ruffo, S.; Tilmes, C.; Venkataraman, B.; Weaver, C. P.
2014-12-01
Effective adaptation to impacts of climate change requires best-available information. To be most useful, this information should be easily found, well-documented, and translated into tools that decision-makers use and trust. To meet these needs, the President's Climate Action Plan includes efforts to develop "actionable climate science". The Climate Data Initiative (CDI) leverages the Federal Government's extensive, open data resources to stimulate innovation and private-sector entrepreneurship in support of actions to prepare for climate change. The Initiative forges commitments and partnerships from the private, NGO, academic, and public sectors to create data-driven tools. Open data from Federal agencies to support this innovation is available on Climate.Data.gov, initially focusing on coastal flooding but soon to expand to topics including food, energy, water, energy, transportation, and health. The Climate Resilience Toolkit (CRT) will facilitate access to data-driven resilience tools, services, and best practices, including those accessible through the CDI. The CRT will also include access to training and tutorials, case studies, engagement forums, and other information sources. The Climate Action Plan also calls for a public-private partnership on extreme weather risk, with the goal of generating improved assessments of risk from different types of extreme weather events, using methods and data that are transparent and accessible. Finally, the U.S. Global Change Research Program and associated agencies work to advance the science necessary to inform decisions and sustain assessments. Collectively, these efforts represent increased emphasis across the Federal Government on the importance of information to support climate resilience.
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Klimanavigator - Climate Navigator - Gateway to climate knowledge in Germany
Schuck-Zöller, Susanne
2013-04-01
Objective More than 50 German research institutions and networks are represented on www.klimanavigator.de, a common platform, where information about their work, and the latest findings from climate research and adaptation can be found. Thus Klimanavigator as a gateway to climate knowledge provides a information portal for those who have to respond to climate change. The internet portal gives an overview of the present state of research and is estimated as a decision support tool for appropriate mitigation and adaptation measures. Target Groups The portal collects the German climate research institutions to publish their scientific knowledge in a non-scientific language. Economists, policymakers, administration and the media are bound to find the names of scientific experts and institutions by an elaborated research tool. Methodology The chapter "Dossiers" is edited by the Klimanavigator-Coordinator CSC. It gathers information to a special issue looked upon from various points of view. Publications of outstanding German scientists are presented side by side, current knowledge is being synthesized, scientifically reviewed and disseminated. The latest news from climate and adaptation research is presented in an own chapter, dedicated to the press releases of the portal members. Via RSS-feed the press releases are collected from the different partner institutions. Thirdly, portraits of the member institutions, that are individually edited by themselves, draw a map of science in Germany and help to find appropriate cooperation partners. For the future further development is being planned. Common Management Klimanavigator is being managed by the partners in common. The main decisions concerning the concept and shape of the portal are made by the partners' assembly. An elected editorial committee decides about the content between the assemblies. The Climate Service Center (part of the Helmholtz-Zentrum Geesthacht) concentrates on facilitating the cooperation, and
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Understanding the school 'climate': secondary school children and climate change
International Nuclear Information System (INIS)
Kovacs, Susan; Bernier, Sandrine; Blanchet, Aymeric; Derkenne, Chantal; Clement, Florence; Petitjean, Leslie
2012-01-01
This interdisciplinary study analyzes the production, circulation and reception of messages on climate change in secondary schools in France. The objective is to understand how political and educational policy initiatives influence the ways in which schools contribute to creating youngsters' perceptions and opinions about climate change. In order to study the conditions of production and reception of information about climate change, a survey was conducted in four French secondary schools, in the 'Bas Rhin' and 'Nord' departments, and local political actors in each department were interviewed. The cross disciplinary analytical and methodological approach uses the tools of sociological inquiry, information science, and political science: questionnaires and interviews were conducted with members of the educational and governmental communities of each school and department, semiotic and discursive analyses of corpuses of documents were carried out, in order to characterize documents used by students and teachers at school or in more informal contexts; the nature and extent of the relations between the political contexts and school directives and programs were also discussed. This interdisciplinary approach, combining sociological, communicational, and political methods, was chosen in response to the hypothesis that three types of variables (social, communicational and political) contribute to the structuring and production of messages about climate change in schools. This report offers a contextualized overview of activities developed within the four secondary schools to help sensitize children to the risks associated with climate change. A study of the networks of individuals (teachers, staff, members of associations, etc.) created in and around the school environment is presented. The degree of involvement of these actors in climate change programs is analyzed, as it is related to their motives and objectives, to the school discipline taught, and to the position
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The climatic out of control. the climatic forcing; L'emballement climatique. Le forcage climatique
Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)
Bony-Lena, S.; Dufresne, J.L. [Laboratoire de Meteorologie Dynamique, LMD/IPSL, CNRS-UPMC, 75 - Paris (France); Acot, P. [Institut d' histoire et de philosophie des sciences et des techniques (IHPST), CNRS-Univ. Paris-1-ENS, 75 - Paris (France); Friedlingstein, P. [CEA Saclay, Lab. des Sciences du Climat et l' Environnement (LSCE), 91 - Gif-sur-Yvette (France); Berger, A.; Loutre, M.L. [Universite Catholique de Louvain (UCL), Louvain-la-Neuve (Belgium). Inst. d' Astronomie et de Geophysique G. Lemaitre; Jouzel, J. [Institut Pierre Simon Laplace, 75 - Paris (France); Raynaud, D. [Laboratoire de Glaciologie et Geophysique de l' Environnement (UMR 5183), 38 - Saint Martin d' Heres cedex (France); Thuiller, W. [Universite Joseph-Fourier, Lab. d' Ecologie Alpine, CNRS-Univ. Grenoble-1, 38 (France); Le Treut, H. [Laboratoire de Meteorologie dynamique du CNRS, 75 - Paris (France); Houssais, M.N. [Laboratoire d' Oceanographie et du Climat Experimentation et Approches Numerique (LOCEAN / IPSL), 75 - Paris (France); Duplessy, J.C. [Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Laboratoire des Sciences du Climat et de l' Environnement (LSCE), 91 - Gif sur Yvette (France); Royer, J.F.; Douville, H. [Centre National de Recherches Meteorologiques, 31 - Toulouse (France); Barberousse, A. [Institut d' Histoire et de Philosophie des Sciences et des Techniques, CNRS, ENS, 75 - Paris (France); Quinon, P
2007-03-15
The expert group on the climate evolution affirms that the global warming is unequivocal and that the human being is the main responsible. This document broaches the climatic change under many aspects: the principle, the historical aspect of the greenhouse effect, the GIEC, the carbon cycle, the paleo-climate theory, the antarctic ices and the impacts of the climatic change on the biodiversity, the simulations and the models, the climatic indicators and the climatic forcing by human activities. (A.L.B.)
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The physics and dynamics of the climate system simulation of climate change
International Nuclear Information System (INIS)
Mitchell, J.F.B.
1991-01-01
The increases in atmospheric Greenhouse gases since 1860 have a radiative effect equivalent to a 40% increase in carbon dioxide concentrations, and by the middle of the next century, are expected to be equivalent to a doubling of carbon dioxide concentration. Simulations with detailed climate models indicate that this would produce a warming of 2 to 5 K in global mean surface temperature at equilibrium, with accompanying changes in precipitation, sea level and other parameters. The observed increase of 0.5 K since 1900 is consistent with the lower range of the estimated potential increase, allowing for a possible slowing of the global mean warming due to the ocean's large thermal inertia. There is an ever pressing need to predict the likely changes in climate due to increases in trace gases and detailed 3-dimensional models of climate are the most promising method of providing the detailed information required for climatic impact assessment. This paper is arranged as follows: 1. Introduction, why model climate. 2. The Greenhouse effect. 3. The principal gases, past, present and future. 4. Climate feedbacks in CO 2 experiments. 5. Equilibrium climate change due to increased CO 2 . 6. Modelling the transient response to increases in trace gases. 7. Uncertainties in the simulation and detection of the climatic effect of increased trace gases. 8. Appeals to the past; simulations for 9000 years before present (9 K bp). 13 figs., 3 tabs., 33 refs
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Altering the Climate of Poverty under Climate Change : the Forests ...
International Development Research Centre (IDRC) Digital Library (Canada)
This project aims to underscore the importance of the Congo basin forests in climate ... Shaping forest safety nets with markets : adaptation to climate change under changing roles ... Driving vaccine innovations to improve lives and livelihoods.
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Energy policies and climate protection
International Nuclear Information System (INIS)
Kerr, A.
1994-01-01
One year after the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, an assessment is made of what progress is being made towards sustainability. The work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) on climate change has provided the expert background for action to protect the climate. It lists some of the measured and noticed first signs of climate change as identified by the German Bundestag Enquete Commission, and mentions the effects of climatically induced catastrophes on the world's insurance industry and the fact that the Third World is likely to suffer most from climatic change. A Greenpeace report advocates the phasing out of fossil fuels and of nuclear power as a way to combat climatic change. The article reviews developments relevant to protecting the climate worldwide and specifically in the Netherlands, incorporating Greenpeace's views on these
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Impacts of Climate Change on Native Landcover: Seeking Future Climatic Refuges
Mangabeira Albernaz, Ana Luisa
2016-01-01
Climate change is a driver for diverse impacts on global biodiversity. We investigated its impacts on native landcover distribution in South America, seeking to predict its effect as a new force driving habitat loss and population isolation. Moreover, we mapped potential future climatic refuges, which are likely to be key areas for biodiversity conservation under climate change scenarios. Climatically similar native landcovers were aggregated using a decision tree, generating a reclassified landcover map, from which 25% of the map’s coverage was randomly selected to fuel distribution models. We selected the best geographical distribution models among twelve techniques, validating the predicted distribution for current climate with the landcover map and used the best technique to predict the future distribution. All landcover categories showed changes in area and displacement of the latitudinal/longitudinal centroid. Closed vegetation was the only landcover type predicted to expand its distributional range. The range contractions predicted for other categories were intense, even suggesting extirpation of the sparse vegetation category. The landcover refuges under future climate change represent a small proportion of the South American area and they are disproportionately represented and unevenly distributed, predominantly occupying five of 26 South American countries. The predicted changes, regardless of their direction and intensity, can put biodiversity at risk because they are expected to occur in the near future in terms of the temporal scales of ecological and evolutionary processes. Recognition of the threat of climate change allows more efficient conservation actions. PMID:27618445
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Impacts of Climate Change on Native Landcover: Seeking Future Climatic Refuges.
Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)
Marina Zanin
Full Text Available Climate change is a driver for diverse impacts on global biodiversity. We investigated its impacts on native landcover distribution in South America, seeking to predict its effect as a new force driving habitat loss and population isolation. Moreover, we mapped potential future climatic refuges, which are likely to be key areas for biodiversity conservation under climate change scenarios. Climatically similar native landcovers were aggregated using a decision tree, generating a reclassified landcover map, from which 25% of the map's coverage was randomly selected to fuel distribution models. We selected the best geographical distribution models among twelve techniques, validating the predicted distribution for current climate with the landcover map and used the best technique to predict the future distribution. All landcover categories showed changes in area and displacement of the latitudinal/longitudinal centroid. Closed vegetation was the only landcover type predicted to expand its distributional range. The range contractions predicted for other categories were intense, even suggesting extirpation of the sparse vegetation category. The landcover refuges under future climate change represent a small proportion of the South American area and they are disproportionately represented and unevenly distributed, predominantly occupying five of 26 South American countries. The predicted changes, regardless of their direction and intensity, can put biodiversity at risk because they are expected to occur in the near future in terms of the temporal scales of ecological and evolutionary processes. Recognition of the threat of climate change allows more efficient conservation actions.
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Climate change research - Danish contributions
International Nuclear Information System (INIS)
Joergensen, A.M.K.; Fenger, J.; Halsnaes, K.
2001-01-01
The book describes a series of Danish scientific and technical studies. They broadly reflect the fields and disciplines embraced by assessments of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), but with an emphasis on natural sciences (i.e. climate investigations and impact studies). After the general introduction, that presents the issue and gives a summary of the content of the book, the chapters are organised in four parts: 1. The Climate System and Climate Variations. 2. Climate Change Scenarios. 3. Impacts of Climate Change. 4. Policy Aspects. Each chapter is indexed separately. (LN)
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CLIMATE CHANGE, Change International Negociations?
Institute of Scientific and Technical Information of China (English)
Gao Xiaosheng
2009-01-01
@@ Climate change is one of key threats to human beings who have to deal with.According to Bali Action Plan released after the 2007 Bali Climate Talk held in Indonesia,the United Nations Framework on Climate Change(UNFCCC) has launched a two-year process to negotiate a post-2012 climate arrangement after the Kyoto Protocol expires in 2012 and the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference will seal a final deal on post-2012 climate regime in December,2009.For this,the United Nation Chief Ban Ki Moon called 2009"the year ofclimate change".
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Climatic classification of the Karst
International Nuclear Information System (INIS)
Eslava Ramirez Jesus Antonio; Bahamon Ayala, Sandra Marcela; Lopez Romero Maria Ines
2000-01-01
Climate is one the main factors in forming or modifying Karsts, or its resulting forms. The determining climatic elements of Karst characteristics are humidity, air circulation and temperature. Many Karstic processes show characteristics corresponding to a given climate sequence. In the present article we discuss the relation between climate and Karst as well as a climate classification based on the structure of the Karsts
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Impacts of Climate Change and Climate Variability on Cocoa ...
African Journals Online (AJOL)
Impacts of Climate Change and Climate Variability on Cocoa ( Theobroma Cacao ) Yields in Meme Division, South West Region of Cameroon. ... Farm selection was based on age, consistency of sizes and management practices in an attempt to keep the factors affecting cocoa yield constant. Data on cocoa yield, flowering, ...
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Climate Change Portal - Home Page
Science Partnerships Contact Us Take Action Climate change is already having significant and widespread of climate change. Business Businesses throughout California are taking action to address climate climate change impacts and informing policies to reduce greenhouse gases, adapt to changing environments
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Presents information, charts and graphs showing measured climate changes across 40 indicators related to greenhouse gases, weather and climate, oceans, snow and ice, heath and society, and ecosystems.
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Simulation of climate variability and anthropogenic climate change
International Nuclear Information System (INIS)
Bengtsson, Lennart
1999-01-01
The climatic changes in the last century were discussed and focus was on the questions: 1) What are the causes of the rapid climate fluctuations and 2) Is the global warming, which is observed during the last century, caused by natural or anthropogenic effects. It is concluded that an understanding of climate based on the interpretation of observational data only is not feasible, unless supported by an adequate theoretical interpretation. The capabilities of climatic models were discussed and the importance of incorporating 1) calculations of the internal variability of the atmosphere when forced from an ocean with prescribed sea surface temperature as well as for a system consisting of an atmosphere and a mixed ocean of limited depth, 2) a fully coupled atmospheric and ocean model and finally, 3) a fully coupled system including transiently changing greenhouse gases and aerosols. A short summation of the results is presented. The pronounced warming during the last century is not reproduced under the assumption of constant forcing and pollution emissions have to be incorporated into the models in order to bring the simulated data in agreement with observations
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Using a Global Climate Model in an On-line Climate Change Course
Randle, D. E.; Chandler, M. A.; Sohl, L. E.
2012-12-01
Seminars on Science: Climate Change is an on-line, graduate-level teacher professional development course offered by the American Museum of Natural History. It is an intensive 6-week course covering a broad range of global climate topics, from the fundamentals of the climate system, to the causes of climate change, the role of paleoclimate investigations, and a discussion of potential consequences and risks. The instructional method blends essays, videos, textbooks, and linked websites, with required participation in electronic discussion forums that are moderated by an experienced educator and a course scientist. Most weeks include additional assignments. Three of these assignments employ computer models, including two weeks spent working with a full-fledged 3D global climate model (GCM). The global climate modeling environment is supplied through a partnership with Columbia University's Educational Global Climate Modeling Project (EdGCM). The objective is to have participants gain hands-on experience with one of the most important, yet misunderstood, aspects of climate change research. Participants in the course are supplied with a USB drive that includes installers for the software and sample data. The EdGCM software includes a version of NASA's global climate model fitted with a graphical user interface and pre-loaded with several climate change simulations. Step-by-step assignments and video tutorials help walk people through these challenging exercises and the course incorporates a special assignment discussion forum to help with technical problems and questions about the NASA GCM. There are several takeaways from our first year and a half of offering this course, which has become one of the most popular out of the twelve courses offered by the Museum. Participants report a high level of satisfaction in using EdGCM. Some report frustration at the initial steps, but overwhelmingly claim that the assignments are worth the effort. Many of the difficulties that
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Terrain Analysis Procedural Guide for Climate,
1980-09-01
days a year at many locations. D. HUMID MICROTHERMAL CLIMATES. The humid microthermal climate occurs in the Northern Hemisphere northward from the...subarctic are the principal types of microthermal climate. 71 1. Humid Continental Climates. These climates border the marine west coast climatic regions...frequently occur during summer in prairie regions. Regions on the southern margin of microthermal climates have long, hot and humid summers lasting from
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Hsiang, S. M.
2013-12-01
Managing climate change requires that we understand the social value of climate-related decisions. Rational decision-making demands that we weigh the potential benefits of climate-related investments against their costs. To date, it has been challenging to quantify the relative social benefit of living under different climatic conditions, so policy debates tend to focus on investment costs without considering their benefits. Here I will discuss challenges and advances in the measurement of climate's impact on society. By linking data and methods across physical and social sciences, we are beginning to understand when, where, and how climatic conditions have a causal impact on human wellbeing. I will present examples from this burgeoning interdisciplinary field that quantify the effect of temperature on macroeconomic performance, the effects of climate on human conflict, and the long-term health and economic impact of tropical cyclones. Each of these examples provide new insight into previously unknown benefits of various climate management strategies. I conclude by describing new efforts to systematically gather and compare findings from across the research community to support informed and rational climate management decisions.
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Climate and climate change sensitivity to model configuration in the Canadian RCM over North America
Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)
De Elia, Ramon [Ouranos Consortium on Regional Climate and Adaptation to Climate Change, Montreal (Canada); Centre ESCER, Univ. du Quebec a Montreal (Canada); Cote, Helene [Ouranos Consortium on Regional Climate and Adaptation to Climate Change, Montreal (Canada)
2010-06-15
Climate simulations performed with Regional Climate Models (RCMs) have been found to show sensitivity to parameter settings. The origin, consequences and interpretations of this sensitivity are varied, but it is generally accepted that sensitivity studies are very important for a better understanding and a more cautious manipulation of RCM results. In this work we present sensitivity experiments performed on the simulated climate produced by the Canadian Regional Climate Model (CRCM). In addition to climate sensitivity to parameter variation, we analyse the impact of the sensitivity on the climate change signal simulated by the CRCM. These studies are performed on 30-year long simulated present and future seasonal climates, and we have analysed the effect of seven kinds of configuration modifications: CRCM initial conditions, lateral boundary condition (LBC), nesting update interval, driving Global Climate Model (GCM), driving GCM member, large-scale spectral nudging, CRCM version, and domain size. Results show that large changes in both the driving model and the CRCM physics seem to be the main sources of sensitivity for the simulated climate and the climate change. Their effects dominate those of configuration issues, such as the use or not of large-scale nudging, domain size, or LBC update interval. Results suggest that in most cases, differences between simulated climates for different CRCM configurations are not transferred to the estimated climate change signal: in general, these tend to cancel each other out. (orig.)
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Climate Action Planning Tool | NREL
NREL's Climate Action Planning Tool provides a quick, basic estimate of how various technology options can contribute to an overall climate action plan for your research campus. Use the tool to Tool Calculation Formulas and Assumptions Climate Neutral Research Campuses Website Climate Neutral
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Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)
Tamiotti, L.; Teh, R.; Kulacoglu, V. (World Trade Organization (WTO), Geneva (Switzerland)); Olhoff, A.; Simmons, B.; Abaza, H. (United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) (Denmark))
2009-06-15
The Report aims to improve understanding about the linkages between trade and climate change. It shows that trade intersects with climate change in a multitude of ways. For example, governments may introduce a variety of policies, such as regulatory measures and economic incentives, to address climate change. This complex web of measures may have an impact on international trade and the multilateral trading system. The Report begins with a summary of the current state of scientific knowledge on climate change and on the options available for responding to the challenge of climate change. The scientific review is followed by a part on the economic aspects of the link between trade and climate change, and these two parts set the context for the subsequent parts of the Report, which looks at the policies introduced at both the international and national level to address climate change. The part on international policy responses to climate change describes multilateral efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and to adapt to the effects of climate change, and also discusses the role of the current trade and environment negotiations in promoting trade in technologies that aim to mitigate climate change. The final part of the Report gives an overview of a range of national policies and measures that have been used in a number of countries to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and to increase energy efficiency. It presents key features in the design and implementation of these policies, in order to draw a clearer picture of their overall effect and potential impact on environmental protection, sustainable development and trade. It also gives, where appropriate, an overview of the WTO rules that may be relevant to such measures. (author)
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Climate Signals: An On-Line Digital Platform for Mapping Climate Change Impacts in Real Time
Cutting, H.
2016-12-01
Climate Signals is an on-line digital platform for cataloging and mapping the impacts of climate change. The CS platform specifies and details the chains of connections between greenhouse gas emissions and individual climate events. Currently in open-beta release, the platform is designed to to engage and serve the general public, news media, and policy-makers, particularly in real-time during extreme climate events. Climate Signals consists of a curated relational database of events and their links to climate change, a mapping engine, and a gallery of climate change monitors offering real-time data. For each event in the database, an infographic engine provides a custom attribution "tree" that illustrates the connections to climate change. In addition, links to key contextual resources are aggregated and curated for each event. All event records are fully annotated with detailed source citations and corresponding hyper links. The system of attribution used to link events to climate change in real-time is detailed here. This open-beta release is offered for public user testing and engagement. Launched in May 2016, the operation of this platform offers lessons for public engagement in climate change impacts.
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[Organizational climate and burnout syndrome].
Lubrańska, Anna
2011-01-01
The paper addresses the issue of organizational climate and burnout syndrome. It has been assumed that burnout syndrome is dependent on work climate (organizational climate), therefore, two concepts were analyzed: by D. Kolb (organizational climate) and by Ch. Maslach (burnout syndrome). The research involved 239 persons (122 woman, 117 men), aged 21-66. In the study Maslach Burnout Inventory (MBI) and Inventory of Organizational Climate were used. The results of statistical methods (correlation analysis, one-variable analysis of variance and regression analysis) evidenced a strong relationship between organizational climate and burnout dimension. As depicted by the results, there are important differences in the level of burnout between the study participants who work in different types of organizational climate. The results of the statistical analyses indicate that the organizational climate determines burnout syndrome. Therefore, creating supportive conditions at the workplace might reduce the risk of burnout.
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The essential interactions between understanding climate variability and climate change
Neelin, J. D.
2017-12-01
Global change is sometimes perceived as a field separate from other aspects of atmospheric and oceanic sciences. Despite the long history of communication between the scientific communities studying global change and those studying interannual variability and weather, increasing specialization and conflicting societal demands on the fields can put these interactions at risk. At the same time, current trajectories for greenhouse gas emissions imply substantial adaptation to climate change will be necessary. Instead of simply projecting effects to be avoided, the field is increasingly being asked to provide regional-level information for specific adaptation strategies—with associated requirements for increased precision on projections. For extreme events, challenges include validating models for rare events, especially for events that are unprecedented in the historical record. These factors will be illustrated with examples of information transfer to climate change from work on fundamental climate processes aimed originally at timescales from hours to interannual. Work to understand the effects that control probability distributions of moisture, temperature and precipitation in historical weather can yield new factors to examine for the changes in the extremes of these distributions under climate change. Surprisingly simple process models can give insights into the behavior of vastly more complex climate models. Observation systems and model ensembles aimed at weather and interannual variations prove valuable for global change and vice versa. Work on teleconnections in the climate system, such as the remote impacts of El Niño, is informing analysis of projected regional rainfall change over California. Young scientists need to prepare to work across the full spectrum of climate variability and change, and to communicate their findings, as they and our society head for future that is more interesting than optimal.
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International Nuclear Information System (INIS)
Beriot, Nicolas; Jouzel, Jean; Masson-Delmotte, Valerie; Braconnot, Pascale; Dufresne, Jean-Louis; Le Treut, Herve; Pachauri, Rajendra; Cazenave, Anny; Planton, Serge; Feral, Jean-Pierre
2014-01-01
Scientists and government delegations from around the world gathered in Stockholm (Sweden) in September 2013 to approve the first volume of the Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). This document reviews existing scientific knowledge on the Earth's climate. How was it prepared? How do scientists conduct research on climate change? What do they know for certain? What remains to be discovered?
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International Nuclear Information System (INIS)
Alfsen, Knut H.
2001-01-01
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has finalized its Third Assessment Report. Among its conclusions is that we must expect continued changes in our climate, despite our efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Planning for and adapting to climate change are therefore necessary. As a starting point, CICERO has written this short note on expected impacts in Norway. The main conclusions are that (1) Adaptation to climate change is necessary (2) Substantial impacts are expected for several important sectors in Norway (3) The local and central authorities should now consider and start planning for adaptation measures. (4) There is still a need for more knowledge about potential impacts of climate change in Norway. (author)
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Compton, Tanya J.; Rijkenberg, Micha J. A.; Drent, Jan; Piersma, Theunis
2007-01-01
The climate variability hypothesis proposes that in variable temperate climates poikilothermic animals have wide thermal tolerance windows, whereas in constant tropical climates they have small thermal tolerance windows. In this study we quantified and compared the upper and lower lethal thermal
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Woerdman, Edwin; Roggenkamp, Martha; Holwerda, Marijn
2015-01-01
This innovative textbook takes a broad approach to EU climate law and presents all available legal instruments to combat climate change, ranging from greenhouse gas emissions trading to the use of renewable energy sources and energy efficiency mechanisms. After providing a definition of climate law,
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Regionalizing global climate models
Pitman, A.J.; Arneth, A.; Ganzeveld, L.N.
2012-01-01
Global climate models simulate the Earth's climate impressively at scales of continents and greater. At these scales, large-scale dynamics and physics largely define the climate. At spatial scales relevant to policy makers, and to impacts and adaptation, many other processes may affect regional and
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Lin, Tzu-Ping; Yang, Shing-Ru; Matzarakis, Andreas
2015-12-01
Climate not only influences the behavior of people in urban environments but also affects people's schedules and travel plans. Therefore, providing people with appropriate long-term climate evaluation information is crucial. Therefore, we developed an innovative climate assessment system based on field investigations conducted in three cities located in Northern, Central, and Southern Taiwan. The field investigations included the questionnaire surveys and climate data collection. We first analyzed the relationship between the participants and climate parameters comprising physiologically equivalent temperature, air temperature, humidity, wind speed, solar radiation, cloud cover, and precipitation. Second, we established the neutral value, comfort range, and dissatisfied range of each parameter. Third, after verifying that the subjects' perception toward the climate parameters vary based on individual preferences, we developed the customized rating assessment of climate suitability (CRACS) approach, which featured functions such as personalized and default climate suitability information to be used by users exhibiting varying demands. Finally, we performed calculations using the climate conditions of two cities during the past 10 years to demonstrate the performance of the CRACS approach. The results can be used as a reference when planning activities in the city or when organizing future travel plans. The flexibility of the assessment system enables it to be adjusted for varying regions and usage characteristics.
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National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Department of Commerce — Comparative Climatic Data is a publication containing data tables of meteorological elements; the publication outlines the climatic conditions at major weather...
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Analysis and detection of climate change
International Nuclear Information System (INIS)
Thejll, P.; Stendel, M.
2001-01-01
The authors first discuss the concepts 'climate' and 'climate change detection', outlining the difficulties of the latter in terms of the properties of the former. In more detail they then discuss the analysis and detection, carried out at the Danish Climate Centre, of anthropogenic climate change and the nonanthropogenic changes regarding anthropogenic climate change the emphasis is on the improvement of global and regional climate models, and the reconstruction of past climates regarding non-anthropogenic changes the authors describe two case studies of potential solar influence on climate. (LN)
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Physical Processes Controlling Earth's Climate
Genio, Anthony Del
2013-01-01
As background for consideration of the climates of the other terrestrial planets in our solar system and the potential habitability of rocky exoplanets, we discuss the basic physics that controls the Earths present climate, with particular emphasis on the energy and water cycles. We define several dimensionless parameters relevant to characterizing a planets general circulation, climate and hydrological cycle. We also consider issues associated with the use of past climate variations as indicators of future anthropogenically forced climate change, and recent advances in understanding projections of future climate that might have implications for Earth-like exoplanets.
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Climate Change and Poverty Reduction
Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)
Anderson, Simon
2011-08-15
Climate change will make it increasingly difficult to achieve and sustain development goals. This is largely because climate effects on poverty remain poorly understood, and poverty reduction strategies do not adequately support climate resilience. Ensuring effective development in the face of climate change requires action on six fronts: investing in a stronger climate and poverty evidence base; applying the learning about development effectiveness to how we address adaptation needs; supporting nationally derived, integrated policies and programmes; including the climate-vulnerable poor in developing strategies; and identifying how mitigation strategies can also reduce poverty and enable adaptation.
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Torresan, S.; Gallina, V.; Giannini, V.; Rizzi, J.; Zabeo, A.; Critto, A.; Marcomini, A.
2012-04-01
At the international level climate services are recognized as innovative tools aimed at providing and distributing climate data and information according to the needs of end-users. Furthermore, needs-based climate services are extremely effective to manage climate risks and take advantage of the opportunities associated with climate change impacts. To date, climate services are mainly related to climate models that supply climate data (e.g. temperature, precipitations) at different spatial and time scales. However, there is a significant gap of tools aimed at providing information about risks and impacts induced by climate change and allowing non-expert stakeholders to use both climate-model and climate-impact data. DESYCO is a GIS-Decision Support System aimed at the integrated assessment of multiple climate change impacts on vulnerable coastal systems (e.g. beaches, river deltas, estuaries and lagoons, wetlands, agricultural and urban areas). It is an open source software that manages different input data (e.g. raster or shapefiles) coming from climate models (e.g. global and regional climate projections) and high resolution impact models (e.g. hydrodynamic, hydrological and biogeochemical simulations) in order to provide hazard, exposure, susceptibility, risk and damage maps for the identification and prioritization of hot-spot areas and to provide a basis for the definition of coastal adaptation and management strategies. Within the CLIM-RUN project (FP7) DESYCO is proposed as an helpful tool to bridge the gap between climate data and stakeholder needs and will be applied to the coastal area of the North Adriatic Sea (Italy) in order to provide climate services for local authorities involved in coastal zone management. Accordingly, a first workshop was held in Venice (Italy) with coastal authorities, climate experts and climate change risk experts, in order to start an iterative exchange of information about the knowledge related to climate change, climate
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International Nuclear Information System (INIS)
2010-01-01
A series of interviews of a member of the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) and of researchers gives an overview of scientific knowledge on climate, discusses what could be a good agreement at the Copenhagen conference, outlines what is at stake in these negotiations, and proposes an overview of the French policy for the struggle against climate change. An article comments the content of a report published by the CAS (Centre d'Analyse Strategique), and more particularly the position of Russia and of the OPEC before the Copenhagen negotiations. A last article comments the results of three opinion surveys made in France about climate change, its origins and solutions, and about the representation French people have of greenhouse effect
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Arctic Climate and Climate Change with a Focus on Greenland
DEFF Research Database (Denmark)
Stendel, Martin; Christensen, Jens Hesselbjerg; Petersen, Dorthe
2008-01-01
Paleoclimatic evidence suggests that the Arctic presently is warmer than during the last 125,000 years, and it is very likely11The term "likelihood" is used here as in the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC AR4). According to the definition in this rep...... Ice Sheet, the fate of arctic sea ice and a possible weakening of the thermohaline circulation (THC) under future warming conditions have led to increased research activities, including an assessment of arctic climate and climate change (ACIA, 2005), the fourth assessment report (AR4...
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Liu, Jianyu; Zhang, Qiang; Zhang, Yongqiang; Chen, Xi; Li, Jianfeng; Aryal, Santosh K.
2017-10-01
Climatic elasticity has been widely applied to assess streamflow responses to climate changes. To fully assess impacts of climate under global warming on streamflow and reduce the error and uncertainty from various control variables, we develop a four-parameter (precipitation, catchment characteristics n, and maximum and minimum temperatures) climatic elasticity method named PnT, based on the widely used Budyko framework and simplified Makkink equation. We use this method to carry out the first comprehensive evaluation of the streamflow response to potential climate change for 372 widely spread catchments in China. The PnT climatic elasticity was first evaluated for a period 1980-2000, and then used to evaluate streamflow change response to climate change based on 12 global climate models under Representative Concentration Pathway 2.6 (RCP2.6) and RCP 8.5 emission scenarios. The results show that (1) the PnT climatic elasticity method is reliable; (2) projected increasing streamflow takes place in more than 60% of the selected catchments, with mean increments of 9% and 15.4% under RCP2.6 and RCP8.5 respectively; and (3) uncertainties in the projected streamflow are considerable in several regions, such as the Pearl River and Yellow River, with more than 40% of the selected catchments showing inconsistent change directions. Our results can help Chinese policy makers to manage and plan water resources more effectively, and the PnT climatic elasticity should be applied to other parts of the world.
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Is extreme climate or moderate climate more conducive to longevity in China?
Huang, Yi; Rosenberg, Mark; Wang, Yingli
2018-02-01
Climate is closely related to human longevity. In China, there are many climate types. According to national population censuses from 1982 to 2000, most provinces with a high ratio of centenarians are located in western and northwestern China far from the sea; these areas are characterized by a dry, cold climate, very high altitude, very high daily temperature range, strong winds, and partial hypoxia. Meanwhile, provinces with a high ratio of nonagenarians from 1982 to 2000 are located in southern China near the sea. Previous studies have attributed the high ratio of centenarians in western and northwestern China to the extreme local climate. However, centenarians in these areas decreased greatly in 2010, whereas residents in southern China frequently reached 90 to 100 years old in 2010. This study aims to explain this strange phenomenon and find whether extreme climate in Tibetan plateau and northwestern China or moderate climate in southern China is more conducive to longevity. The study found that mortality rate in Tibetan plateau is much higher than southern China, then a population evolution experiment was proposed to compare longevity indicators between low mortality rate and high mortality rate and shows that longevity indicators will decrease in the near future and increase above their original levels after several decades when the mortality rate is decreased. Results of this study show individuals in northwestern China do not live as long as those in eastern and southern China. A moderate climate is more conducive to longevity than extreme climate in China. The longevity of a region should be judged by long-term longevity indicators.
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Eccles, Robert G; Youmans, Timothy John
2016-01-01
Can custody banks become key players in climate change? Custody banks joining the battle against climate change will signal a significant shift in governance ideology for this highly regulated industry so critical to the global financial system. While global custody banks provide the unseen but essential support system that ensures the proper functioning of the capital markets, they have great untapped potential to become change-makers in climate change. This paper expands on our idea of the ...
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Plant Distribution Data Show Broader Climatic Limits than Expert-Based Climatic Tolerance Estimates.
Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)
Caroline A Curtis
Full Text Available Although increasingly sophisticated environmental measures are being applied to species distributions models, the focus remains on using climatic data to provide estimates of habitat suitability. Climatic tolerance estimates based on expert knowledge are available for a wide range of plants via the USDA PLANTS database. We aim to test how climatic tolerance inferred from plant distribution records relates to tolerance estimated by experts. Further, we use this information to identify circumstances when species distributions are more likely to approximate climatic tolerance.We compiled expert knowledge estimates of minimum and maximum precipitation and minimum temperature tolerance for over 1800 conservation plant species from the 'plant characteristics' information in the USDA PLANTS database. We derived climatic tolerance from distribution data downloaded from the Global Biodiversity and Information Facility (GBIF and corresponding climate from WorldClim. We compared expert-derived climatic tolerance to empirical estimates to find the difference between their inferred climate niches (ΔCN, and tested whether ΔCN was influenced by growth form or range size.Climate niches calculated from distribution data were significantly broader than expert-based tolerance estimates (Mann-Whitney p values << 0.001. The average plant could tolerate 24 mm lower minimum precipitation, 14 mm higher maximum precipitation, and 7° C lower minimum temperatures based on distribution data relative to expert-based tolerance estimates. Species with larger ranges had greater ΔCN for minimum precipitation and minimum temperature. For maximum precipitation and minimum temperature, forbs and grasses tended to have larger ΔCN while grasses and trees had larger ΔCN for minimum precipitation.Our results show that distribution data are consistently broader than USDA PLANTS experts' knowledge and likely provide more robust estimates of climatic tolerance, especially for
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Norwegian climate research. An evaluation
Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)
NONE
2012-06-15
[English] In early 2011, the Norwegian Research Council (RCN) appointed a committee to review Norwegian climate research. The aim of the evaluation was to provide a critical review of Norwegian climate research in an international perspective and to recommend measures to enhance the quality, efficiency and relevance of future climate research. The Evaluation Committee met three times: in August and December 2011, and March 2012. RCN sent an invitation to 140 research organisations to participate by delivering background information on their climate research. Based on the initial response, 48 research units were invited to submit self-assessments and 37 research units responded. These were invited to hearings during the second meeting of the Evaluation Committee in December. In our judgement, a great majority of the most active research units are covered by this evaluation report. It should be emphasised that the evaluation concerned the Norwegian landscape of climate research rather than individual scientists or research units. Bibliometric analyses and social network analyses provided additional information. We are aware of problems in making comparisons across disciplinary publishing traditions, especially with regard to the differences between the natural and social sciences and the humanities. The Evaluation Committee also reviewed a number of governmental and RCN policy documents and conducted interviews with the chairs of the NORKLIMA Programme Steering Board and the Norwegian IPY Committee, as well as with staff members of RCN. Additional information was received from hearings organised by RCN with the science communities and various stakeholders in January 2012. For the purpose of this evaluation, climate research was divided into three broad thematic areas: 1. The climate system and climate change: research on climate variability and change in order to improve our capability of understanding climate and of projecting climate change for different time
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Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)
Baadsgaard Lange, R.; Moerck Jensen, K.
2013-09-01
Climate change is expected to intensify water security concerns in international river basins. UNFCCC and DAC-donors have been important generators of political attention to the climate agenda among governments in the Mekong Basin in relation to regional cooperation, national policy-making and capacity building. However, the formal commitment to climate action is not necessarily reflected in the everyday business of development. In this paper we use a political economy approach to understand when and how climate change becomes a political priority for the governments of Laos, Thailand and Vietnam, and for transboundary cooperation. Uneven distribution of climate hazards and vulnerabilities create different national risk perceptions and commitment to climate action. Donor funding and national development strategies are also strong drivers of climate action and inaction. Climate change is sometimes used as a scapegoat for domestic policy failures and as a tool to acquire donor funding. We recommend prioritizing climate action in the context of immediate development challenges and 'no regrets' interventions that are likely to enhance adaptive capacity and governments' commitment. (Author)
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Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)
Fortelius, C; Holopainen, E; Kaurola, J; Ruosteenoja, K; Raeisaenen, J [Helsinki Univ. (Finland). Dept. of Meteorology
1997-12-31
In recent years the modelling of interannual climate variability has been studied, the atmospheric energy and water cycles, and climate simulations with the ECHAM3 model. In addition, the climate simulations of several models have been compared with special emphasis in the area of northern Europe
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Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)
Fortelius, C.; Holopainen, E.; Kaurola, J.; Ruosteenoja, K.; Raeisaenen, J. [Helsinki Univ. (Finland). Dept. of Meteorology
1996-12-31
In recent years the modelling of interannual climate variability has been studied, the atmospheric energy and water cycles, and climate simulations with the ECHAM3 model. In addition, the climate simulations of several models have been compared with special emphasis in the area of northern Europe
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Using large-scale climate indices in climate change ecology studies
DEFF Research Database (Denmark)
Forchhammer, Mads Cedergreen; Post, Eric
2004-01-01
Ecological responses, El Niño 3.4, Long-term climate variability, North Atlantic Oscillation, North Pacific Oscillation, Teleconnection patterns......Ecological responses, El Niño 3.4, Long-term climate variability, North Atlantic Oscillation, North Pacific Oscillation, Teleconnection patterns...
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Estimating Non-Market Impacts of Climate Change and Climate Policy
International Nuclear Information System (INIS)
Rothman, D.S.; Amelung, B.; Polome, P.
2003-01-01
A number of studies over the past few decades have attempted to estimate the potential impacts of climate change and climate policy. For reasons related to, inter alia, our incomplete understanding of the workings of many natural and social systems, the tremendous spatial and temporal variability in these systems, and the long time frames over which the issue of climate change will play out, there are large degrees of uncertainty in these estimates. Some of the most rancorous debates, however, have focused on those studies that have attempted to place economic values on these impacts. This should not be surprising as the outcomes of these studies have played an important role in the debates over climate policy. Rightly or wrongly, the estimates presented in these studies are often held up against similar estimates of the costs of mitigating against climate change. The process of economic valuation of environmental and social issues is still relatively young, much less its application to the potential impacts of climate change and climate policy. Issues such as climate change push existing techniques to their limits, and possibly beyond. Among the topics that have raised the most concern are the choice of the proper baseline against which to make comparisons, the treatment of uncertainty in human and natural systems, incomplete accounting, the actual valuation of specific impacts, and the aggregation of impacts over time and across widely differing societies. Some of the more recent studies have tried to address these issues, albeit not always satisfactorily. One aspect that makes the economic valuation of environmental and social issues difficult is that it requires addressing impacts that are not typically associated with economic markets, so called nonmarket impacts. In addition to not being traded in markets, many of these impacts affect goods and services that have the characteristic of being public goods, i.e. it is not possible to restrict their use to a
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International Nuclear Information System (INIS)
Mathy, Sandrine
2015-01-01
The next Conference of the Parties (COP) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change will be held in France in late 2015. The aim of the gathering will be to arrive at an international agreement to keep global warming below an upper limit of 2 deg. C (above 1990 levels) by the end of the century. As the COPs of recent years have shown, this is an ambitious goal and many obstacles stand in its way, among them the development of emerging and developing nations. Why should these countries be forced to restrict their economic development when 'liability for climate change' rests mainly with the developed nations? The question is entirely legitimate, which is why it would probably be more constructive, as Sandrine Mathy advocates here, to negotiate in a way that combines thinking on Millennium Development Goals with climate objectives. As this article shows, it is entirely possible to combine these two types of aim and promote economic development and poverty reduction while, at the same time, striving to limit greenhouse gas emissions. Mathy shows what the common factors are and frames concrete recommendations for establishing a mechanism to promote this convergence between poverty reduction and climate preservation. (author)
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Anderson, G.
2012-04-01
Climate Services for Development Planning and Implementation: A Framework for Assessing and Valuing Climate Services Anderson, Glen D. While weather forecasting products have been available globally for decades, the full suite of climate services - including historical and real time observational meteorological data, daily, weekly, and seasonal forecasts, and longer-term climate projections - has only been under development in the last 15 to 20 years. Climate services have been developed and implemented quite quickly in developed countries for public and private sector users. However, diffusion of these tools in developing countries has been slower for several reasons related to 1) lack of awareness of the opportunities and benefits of climate services; 2) spotty record of managing local weather and climate data; and 3) limited resources to build and sustain capacity in providing climate services. The Climate Services Partnership (CSP) was formed during the International Conference on Climate Services (ICCS) in October 2011. The CSP seeks to improve the provision and development of climate services worldwide. During the ICCS, three working groups were formed to carry out the work program of the CSP leading up to the second ICCS in Berlin in September 2012. The Economic Valuation of Climate Services Working Group, chaired by John Zillman and myself, is collaborating on several activities to demonstrate the benefits of climate services and help providers prioritize opportunities for expanding the use of climate services. The proposed paper will provide an overview of the Working Group's activities leading up to the next ICCS and describe specific work that is underway and expected to be completed prior to the EGU meetings. The focal point of the Working Group's activities is the development of matrix to help identify and value the best opportunities for using climate services. Different categories of climate services will be listed in rows and potential users of
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Micro climate Simulation in new Town `Hashtgerd' using downscaled climate data
Sodoudi, S.
2010-12-01
One of the objectives of climatological part of project Young Cities ‘Developing Energy-Efficient Urban Fabric in the Tehran-Karaj Region’ is to simulate the micro climate (with 1m resolution) in 35ha of new town Hashtgerd, which is located 65 km far from mega city Tehran. The Project aims are developing, implementing and evaluating building and planning schemes and technologies which allow to plan and build sustainable, energy-efficient and climate sensible form mass housing settlements in arid and semi-arid regions (energy-efficient fabric). Climate sensitive form also means designing and planning for climate change and its related effects for Hashtgerd New Town. By configuration of buildings and open spaces according to solar radiation, wind and vegetation, climate sensitive urban form can create outdoor thermal comfort. To simulate the climate on small spatial scales, the micro climate model Envi-met has been used to simulate the micro climate in 35 ha. The Eulerian model ENVI-met is a micro-scale climate model which gives information about the influence of architecture and buildings as well as vegetation and green area on the micro climate up to 1 m resolution. Envi-met has been run with information from topography, downscaled climate data with neuro-fuzzy method, meteorological measurements, building height and different vegetation variants (low and high number of trees) The first results were compared with each other and show In semi-arid climates the protection from solar radiation is of major importance. This can be achieved by implementation of vegetation and geometry of buildings. Due to the geographical location and related sun’s orbit the degree of shading in this area is rather low. Technical construction such awnings have to be implemented. A second important factor is wind. The design follows the idea to block the prevailing winds from west and northwest as well as the hot and dusty winds in summer time from the southeast but at the same time
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Randalls, Samuel
2011-01-01
Historical accounts of climate change science and policy have reflected rather infrequently upon the debates, discussions, and policy advice proffered by economists in the 1980s. While there are many forms of economic analysis, this article focuses upon cost-benefit analysis, especially as adopted in the work of William Nordhaus. The article addresses the way in which climate change economics subtly altered debates about climate policy from the late 1970s through the 1990s. These debates are often technical and complex, but the argument in this article is that the development of a philosophy of climate change as an issue for cost-benefit analysis has had consequences for how climate policy is made today.
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Ground Water and Climate Change
Taylor, Richard G.; Scanlon, Bridget; Doell, Petra; Rodell, Matt; van Beek, Rens; Wada, Yoshihide; Longuevergne, Laurent; Leblanc, Marc; Famiglietti, James S.; Edmunds, Mike;
2013-01-01
As the world's largest distributed store of fresh water, ground water plays a central part in sustaining ecosystems and enabling human adaptation to climate variability and change. The strategic importance of ground water for global water and food security will probably intensify under climate change as more frequent and intense climate extremes (droughts and floods) increase variability in precipitation, soil moisture and surface water. Here we critically review recent research assessing the impacts of climate on ground water through natural and human-induced processes as well as through groundwater-driven feedbacks on the climate system. Furthermore, we examine the possible opportunities and challenges of using and sustaining groundwater resources in climate adaptation strategies, and highlight the lack of groundwater observations, which, at present, limits our understanding of the dynamic relationship between ground water and climate.
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Climate Prediction Center - Seasonal Outlook
Weather Service NWS logo - Click to go to the NWS home page Climate Prediction Center Site Map News Forecast Discussion PROGNOSTIC DISCUSSION FOR MONTHLY OUTLOOK NWS CLIMATE PREDICTION CENTER COLLEGE PARK MD INFLUENCE ON THE MONTHLY-AVERAGED CLIMATE. OUR MID-MONTH ASSESSMENT OF LOW-FREQUENCY CLIMATE VARIABILITY IS
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Cegnar, T.
2010-09-01
Arts and climate science have more in common points than it appears at first glance. Artistic works can help us to directly or indirectly learn about climatic conditions and weather events in the past, but are also very efficient in raising awareness about climate change nowadays. Long scientific articles get very little response among general public, because most people don't want to read long articles. There is a need to communicate climate change issues more powerfully and more directly, with simple words, pictures, sculptures, installations. Artistic works can inspire people to take concrete action. A number of communication media can fit this purpose. Artists can speak to people on an emotional and intellectual level; they can help people to see things from another perspective and in new ways. Artists can motivate change; they have the freedom to weave facts, opinions, thoughts, emotion and colour all together. Paintings are witnesses of the past climatic conditions. We can learn from paintings, architectural constructions and sculptures about the vegetation, weather events, animals, and way of living. Mentioning only some few examples: old paintings in caves, also Flemish painters are often shown for their winter landscapes, and paintings are very useful to illustrate how fast glaciers are melting. At the end, we shall not forget that dilapidation of art masterpieces often depends on climatic conditions.
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Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)
Xian-Ge Hu
2017-12-01
Full Text Available Climate niche modeling has been widely used to assess the impact of climate change on forest trees at the species level. However, geographically divergent tree populations are expected to respond differently to climate change. Considering intraspecific local adaptation in modeling species responses to climate change will thus improve the credibility and usefulness of climate niche models, particularly for genetic resources management. In this study, we used five Platycladus orientalis (L. seed zones (Northwestern; Northern; Central; Southern; and Subtropical covering the entire species range in China. A climate niche model was developed and used to project the suitable climatic conditions for each of the five seed zones for current and various future climate scenarios (Representative Concentration Pathways: RCP2.6, RCP4.5, RCP6.0, and RCP8.5. Our results indicated that the Subtropical seed zone would show consistent reduction for all climate change scenarios. The remaining seed zones, however, would experience various degrees of expansion in suitable habitat relative to their current geographic distributions. Most of the seed zones would gain suitable habitats at their northern distribution margins and higher latitudes. Thus, we recommend adjusting the current forest management strategies to mitigate the negative impacts of climate change.
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Climate change impacts on the disposal environment: a climate analogue approach - 59274
International Nuclear Information System (INIS)
Leterme, Bertrand; Mallants, Dirk
2012-01-01
Document available in abstract form only. Full text of publication follows: The Belgian Agency for Radioactive Waste and Enriched Fissile Materials (ONDRAF/NIRAS) aims to develop a surface disposal facility for L/ILW in Dessel (North-East of Belgium). The objective of this study is to provide estimates for the next few millennia of both infiltration through the planned earth cover and groundwater recharge in the vicinity of the Dessel site. Available predictions of future temperature and precipitation often extend until AD 2100 only (e.g. IPCC). To circumvent this data limitation, we use existing records of climatic analogue stations deemed representative of future climates in Belgium. The following climate states are considered: DO (maritime temperate, present-day climate in Dessel), Cs/Cr (subtropical with dry summers/no rainfall seasonality), EO (cold without permafrost) and FT (cold with permafrost). Climate data is then used in 1-D modelling of the soil-plant-atmosphere system to quantify infiltration through the earth cover and recharge to groundwater for a sequence of probable future climate states. Using criteria including altitude, distance to moisture source, and atmospheric circulation system, several analogue stations were selected for each climate state Cs/Cr and EO/FT. They provided time series (30 years) of meteorological observations that allowed calculating potential evapotranspiration and water balance components for soils overlying the repository
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Goklany;, I. M.
2004-01-01
Sir David A. King's claim that "Climate change is the most severe problem that we are facing today—more serious even than the threat of terrorism" "Climate change is the most severe problem that we are facing today—more serious even than the threat of terrorism" ("Climate change
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Chatham Islands Climate Change
International Nuclear Information System (INIS)
Mullan, B.; Salinger, J.; Thompson, C.; Ramsay, D.; Wild, M.
2005-06-01
This brief report provides guidance on climate change specific to the Chatham Islands, to complement the information recently produced for local government by the Ministry for the Environment in 'Climate Change Effects and Impacts Assessment: A guidance manual for Local Government in New Zealand' and 'Coastal Hazards and Climate Change: A guidance manual for Local Government in New Zealand'. These previous reports contain a lot of generic information on climate change, and how to assess associated risks, that is relevant to the Chatham Islands Council.
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Federal Laboratory Consortium — The Doriot Climatic Chambers are two, 60-feet long, 11-feet high, 15-feet wide chambers that are owned and operated by NSRDEC. The Doriot Climatic Chambers are among...
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Communities under climate change
DEFF Research Database (Denmark)
Nogues, David Bravo; Rahbek, Carsten
2011-01-01
The distribution of species on Earth and the interactions among them are tightly linked to historical and contemporary climate, so that global climate change will transform the world in which we live. Biological models can now credibly link recent decadal trends in field data to climate change......, but predicting future impacts on biological communities is a major challenge. Attempts to move beyond general macroecological predictions of climate change impact on one hand, and observations from specific, local-scale cases, small-scale experiments, or studies of a few species on the other, raise a plethora...... of unanswered questions. On page 1124 of this issue, Harley (1) reports results that cast new light on how biodiversity, across different trophic levels, responds to climate change....
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Climate-conscious architecture. Design and wind testing method for climates in change
Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)
Kuismanen, K.
2008-07-01
The main objective of this research was to develop practical tools with which it is possible to improve the environment, micro-climate and energy economy of buildings and plans in different climate zones, and take the climate change into account. The parts of the study are: State of art study into existing know-how about climate and planning. Study of the effects of climate change on the built environment. Development of simple micro-climate, nature and built environment analysis methods. Defining the criteria of an acceptable micro-climatic environment. Development of the wind test blower. Presenting ways to interpret test results and draw conclusions. Development of planning and design guidelines for different climate zones. An important part of the research is the development of the CASE wind test instrument, different wind simulation techniques, and the methods of observing the results. Bioclimatic planning and architectural design guidelines for different climate zones are produced. The analyse tools developed give a qualitative overall view, which can be deepened towards a quantitative analyse with wind testing measurements and roughness calculations. No mechanical rules are suggested, but complementary viewpoints and practices introduced to a normal planning process as well as improvement of consultative knowledge. The 'method' is that there is no strict mechanical method, but a deeper understanding of bioclimatic matters. Climate-conscious planning with the developed CASE method, make it possible to design a better micro-climate for new or old built-up areas. Winds can be used in to ventilate exhaust fumes and other pollutants, which improves the quality of air and the healthiness of the urban environment. The analyses and scale-model tests make it possible to shield cold windy areas and to diminish the cooling effect of wind on facades. According to studies in Scandinavian countries this will bring energy savings of 5-15 per cent. The method can
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The Canadian Centre for Climate Modelling and Analysis global coupled model and its climate
Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)
Flato, G.M.; Boer, G.J.; Lee, W.G.; McFarlane, N.A.; Ramsden, D.; Reader, M.C. [Canadian Centre for Climate Modelling and Analysis, Victoria, BC (Canada); Weaver, A.J. [School of Earth and Ocean Sciences, University of Victoria, BC (Canada)
2000-06-01
A global, three-dimensional climate model, developed by coupling the CCCma second-generation atmospheric general circulation model (GCM2) to a version of the GFDL modular ocean model (MOM1), forms the basis for extended simulations of past, current and projected future climate. The spin-up and coupling procedures are described, as is the resulting climate based on a 200 year model simulation with constant atmospheric composition and external forcing. The simulated climate is systematically compared to available observations in terms of mean climate quantities and their spatial patterns, temporal variability, and regional behavior. Such comparison demonstrates a generally successful reproduction of the broad features of mean climate quantities, albeit with local discrepancies. Variability is generally well-simulated over land, but somewhat underestimated in the tropical ocean and the extratropical storm-track regions. The modelled climate state shows only small trends, indicating a reasonable level of balance at the surface, which is achieved in part by the use of heat and freshwater flux adjustments. The control simulation provides a basis against which to compare simulated climate change due to historical and projected greenhouse gas and aerosol forcing as described in companion publications. (orig.)
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Climate consoles: Pieces in the puzzle of climate change adaptation
Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)
Dominique Bachelet
2017-12-01
Full Text Available Conservation Biology Institute (CBI has been developing web applications to centralize and serve credible and usable information that allows natural resource managers, as well as the general public, to better understand the challenges posed by on-going environmental change. In particular CBI has designed a series of climate consoles that provide natural resource managers the most recent 5th Climate Model Intercomparison Program (CMIP5 climate projections, landscape intactness, and soil sensitivity for a series of reporting units over the western United States. The publically available web sites were refined based on feedback from a variety of users. In this paper, we describe each of the tools developed as open-source applications and provide details of their infrastructure in the hope they can be used and possibly modified by a wider audience. They were designed to be used as stepping-stones towards planning effective climate change adaptation strategies.
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Making the Climate Count: Climate Policy Integration and Coherence in Finland
Kivimaa, Paula; Mickwitz, Per
2009-01-01
Tackling climate change in Finland and other industrialised countries requires major changes in production processes and consumption patterns. These changes will not take place unless climate change becomes a crucial factor in general and sector-specific policy-making. In this report climate policy integration in Finland is studied at different levels of policy-making: at the national level, regionally in Kymenlakso and the Metropolitan Area, as well as in the city of Helsinki and the town of...
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Houet, Thomas; Pigeon, Grégoire
2011-01-01
Facing the concern of the population to its environment and to climatic change, city planners are now considering the urban climate in their choices of planning. The use of climatic maps, such Urban Climate Zone‑UCZ, is adapted for this kind of application. The objective of this paper is to demonstrate that the UCZ classification, integrated in the World Meteorological Organization guidelines, first can be automatically determined for sample areas and second is meaningful according to climatic variables. The analysis presented is applied on Toulouse urban area (France). Results show first that UCZ differentiate according to air and surface temperature. It has been possible to determine the membership of sample areas to an UCZ using landscape descriptors automatically computed with GIS and remote sensed data. It also emphasizes that climate behavior and magnitude of UCZ may vary from winter to summer. Finally we discuss the influence of climate data and scale of observation on UCZ mapping and climate characterization. Copyright © 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
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Gregg, Jay; Bille, Dorthe
2017-04-01
The Climate Museum and Garden is conceived as a cross-disciplinary experience, where the arts and sciences link together to increase understanding of the Earth's climate and its relevance to our fate as a species. This would be a place of inspiration. The Climate Museum and Garden would merge concepts of modern art museums and modern science museums, with exhibitions, live music and theater performances, visitor interaction, unique discoveries and reflection. It would be a place where visitors are immersed in experiences, lingering indoors and out in quiet consideration and gratitude for our planet's atmosphere. The story of climate change is compelling in its own right; theories of the greenhouse effect go back over century and climate policy has stretched back a few decades. Whereas scientific researchers have been contributing to understanding the mechanisms and impacts of climate change for many decades; whereas researchers have participated in climate summits and informed policy makers; whereas researchers have taught classes of gifted students; in all of this, the public has mostly missed out. This public relations gap has been unfortunately filled by those that would seek to politicize and mislead the public, leading to an engagement gap among the general public. Now we stand on a precipice. Therefore we see a ripe opportunity to reach out and inspire the population. We build off of current pedagogic research that shows that experienced-based learning is more impactful when it engages the senses and elicits an emotional response. People understand what they experience, what they feel, and this serves as the basis for personal reflection. In this sense the visitor experience is generative, in that it promotes further personal investigation and interaction. The Climate Museum and Garden would be a start. In the future, we envisage a future network of climate museums in all major cities. It would be a flagship attraction for any city, along with their art
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DEFF Research Database (Denmark)
Masson-Delmotte, Valérie; Swingedouw, Didier; Landais, Amaëlle
2012-01-01
Climate archives available from deep-sea and marine shelf sediments, glaciers, lakes and ice cores in and around Greenland allow us to place the current trends in regional climate, ice sheet dynamics, and land surface changes in a broader perspective. We show that during the last decade (2000s......), atmospheric and sea-surface temperatures are reaching levels last encountered millennia ago when northern high latitude summer insolation was higher due to a different orbital configuration. Concurrently, records from lake sediments in southern Greenland document major environmental and climatic conditions...... regional climate and ice sheet dynamics. The magnitude and rate of future changes in Greenland temperature, in response to increasing greenhouse gas emissions, may be faster than any past abrupt events occurring under interglacial conditions. Projections indicate that within one century Greenland may...
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DEFF Research Database (Denmark)
Brander, Keith
2009-01-01
Fish stocks and the fisheries based on them have always experienced variability due to climate. Changes in temperature, salinity, winds, ocean currents, oxygen, and other factors affect their distribution, growth, survival, and recruitment. Examples of such effects are given for several regions...... of the oceans and the processes are described. Poleward distribution shifts have occurred since the 1960s and can be attributed to the effects of anthropogenic climate change with a high degree of confidence. In addition to climate effects, fisheries are subjected to other anthropogenic stresses, including high...... fishing mortality, loss of habitat, pollution, and introduction of alien species. These interact and may reduce the resilience of exploited stocks, although climate change may also increase productivity in some cases. Fisheries production depends on primary production, but to date we have low confidence...
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A New High Resolution Climate Dataset for Climate Change Impacts Assessments in New England
Komurcu, M.; Huber, M.
2016-12-01
Assessing regional impacts of climate change (such as changes in extreme events, land surface hydrology, water resources, energy, ecosystems and economy) requires much higher resolution climate variables than those available from global model projections. While it is possible to run global models in higher resolution, the high computational cost associated with these simulations prevent their use in such manner. To alleviate this problem, dynamical downscaling offers a method to deliver higher resolution climate variables. As part of an NSF EPSCoR funded interdisciplinary effort to assess climate change impacts on New Hampshire ecosystems, hydrology and economy (the New Hampshire Ecosystems and Society project), we create a unique high-resolution climate dataset for New England. We dynamically downscale global model projections under a high impact emissions scenario using the Weather Research and Forecasting model (WRF) with three nested grids of 27, 9 and 3 km horizontal resolution with the highest resolution innermost grid focusing over New England. We prefer dynamical downscaling over other methods such as statistical downscaling because it employs physical equations to progressively simulate climate variables as atmospheric processes interact with surface processes, emissions, radiation, clouds, precipitation and other model components, hence eliminates fix relationships between variables. In addition to simulating mean changes in regional climate, dynamical downscaling also allows for the simulation of climate extremes that significantly alter climate change impacts. We simulate three time slices: 2006-2015, 2040-2060 and 2080-2100. This new high-resolution climate dataset (with more than 200 variables saved in hourly (six hourly) intervals for the highest resolution domain (outer two domains)) along with model input and restart files used in our WRF simulations will be publicly available for use to the broader scientific community to support in-depth climate
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Climate: from yesterday to tomorrow
International Nuclear Information System (INIS)
Joussaume, S.
1999-01-01
Historical climatology and paleoclimatology aim at understanding the climatic memory of the Earth using geological and biological markers. These climate archives are used to understand the origins of climate changes in the past and to foresee the future climate changes according to the present day changes (global warming, greenhouse gases accumulation). (J.S.)
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The Climate-G testbed: towards a large scale data sharing environment for climate change
Aloisio, G.; Fiore, S.; Denvil, S.; Petitdidier, M.; Fox, P.; Schwichtenberg, H.; Blower, J.; Barbera, R.
2009-04-01
The Climate-G testbed provides an experimental large scale data environment for climate change addressing challenging data and metadata management issues. The main scope of Climate-G is to allow scientists to carry out geographical and cross-institutional climate data discovery, access, visualization and sharing. Climate-G is a multidisciplinary collaboration involving both climate and computer scientists and it currently involves several partners such as: Centro Euro-Mediterraneo per i Cambiamenti Climatici (CMCC), Institut Pierre-Simon Laplace (IPSL), Fraunhofer Institut für Algorithmen und Wissenschaftliches Rechnen (SCAI), National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), University of Reading, University of Catania and University of Salento. To perform distributed metadata search and discovery, we adopted a CMCC metadata solution (which provides a high level of scalability, transparency, fault tolerance and autonomy) leveraging both on P2P and grid technologies (GRelC Data Access and Integration Service). Moreover, data are available through OPeNDAP/THREDDS services, Live Access Server as well as the OGC compliant Web Map Service and they can be downloaded, visualized, accessed into the proposed environment through the Climate-G Data Distribution Centre (DDC), the web gateway to the Climate-G digital library. The DDC is a data-grid portal allowing users to easily, securely and transparently perform search/discovery, metadata management, data access, data visualization, etc. Godiva2 (integrated into the DDC) displays 2D maps (and animations) and also exports maps for display on the Google Earth virtual globe. Presently, Climate-G publishes (through the DDC) about 2TB of data related to the ENSEMBLES project (also including distributed replicas of data) as well as to the IPCC AR4. The main results of the proposed work are: wide data access/sharing environment for climate change; P2P/grid metadata approach; production-level Climate-G DDC; high quality tools for
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Climate Certainties and Uncertainties
International Nuclear Information System (INIS)
Morel, Pierre
2012-01-01
In issue 380 of Futuribles in December 2011, Antonin Pottier analysed in detail the workings of what is today termed 'climate scepticism' - namely the propensity of certain individuals to contest the reality of climate change on the basis of pseudo-scientific arguments. He emphasized particularly that what fuels the debate on climate change is, largely, the degree of uncertainty inherent in the consequences to be anticipated from observation of the facts, not the description of the facts itself. In his view, the main aim of climate sceptics is to block the political measures for combating climate change. However, since they do not admit to this political posture, they choose instead to deny the scientific reality. This month, Futuribles complements this socio-psychological analysis of climate-sceptical discourse with an - in this case, wholly scientific - analysis of what we know (or do not know) about climate change on our planet. Pierre Morel gives a detailed account of the state of our knowledge in the climate field and what we are able to predict in the medium/long-term. After reminding us of the influence of atmospheric meteorological processes on the climate, he specifies the extent of global warming observed since 1850 and the main origin of that warming, as revealed by the current state of knowledge: the increase in the concentration of greenhouse gases. He then describes the changes in meteorological regimes (showing also the limits of climate simulation models), the modifications of hydrological regimes, and also the prospects for rises in sea levels. He also specifies the mechanisms that may potentially amplify all these phenomena and the climate disasters that might ensue. Lastly, he shows what are the scientific data that cannot be disregarded, the consequences of which are now inescapable (melting of the ice-caps, rises in sea level etc.), the only remaining uncertainty in this connection being the date at which these things will happen. 'In this
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Poppleton, K. L. I.
2017-12-01
Climate Generation: A Will Steger Legacy empowers youth, educators, decision-makers and the public to foster climate literacy and action with the goal of building a more equitable and resilient future. We have over eleven years of experience delivering high-quality K-12 education, public engagement and youth leadership programming, reaching over 75,000 people, 35,000 students and 17,000 educators since 2006. By engaging educators, youth, and the public, we believe that communities can be better positioned to build a resilient and equitable future. For this reason we strive to engage with all these sectors through innovative programming and policy initiatives. Communities are resilient when individuals are connected to each other, resources, and decision-makers. Sharing personal narratives, and highlighting locally relevant solutions are all tools that Climate Generation employs to engage the public. We do this through community wide convenings, as well as sector specific events including at breweries, art fairs, and businesses. Education is also an integral piece for sustained action on climate change. We support educators with a science-based, interdisciplinary model of climate change education that engages all learners, and fosters climate literacy and action. We develop curriculum and offer professional development, encouraging teachers to develop today's students into action-competent citizens. Finally, Climate Generation recognizes the importance of empowering high school youth as a key strategy in transitioning to a just and sustainable future for all. We believe in the inherent genius of youth and know from experience that mentorship fosters powerful youth leadership at the community level, inspiring peers, family members, and local decision-makers to take critical action on climate change solutions. In order to accelerate and implement action on climate change we must take a multi-faceted approach: we are building public will for strong climate action at
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Climate Literacy: Climate.gov Follow-Up Evaluation—A Study of the Four NOAA Audiences
Niepold, F., III; Sullivan, S. B.; Gold, A. U.; Lynds, S. E.; Kirk, K.
2014-12-01
NOAA Climate.gov provides science and information for a climate-smart nation. Americans' health, security, and economic well-being are closely linked to climate and weather. NOAA Climate.gov's goals are to promote public understanding of climate science and climate-related events, to make our data products and services easy to access and use, to support educators in improving the nations climate literacy, and to serve people making climate-related decisions with tools and resources that help them answer specific questions.The Climate.Gov Follow-Up Study of the four NOAA Audiences (climate interested public, educators, scientists, policy-makers) built upon the previous literature review and evaluation study conducted by Mooney and Phillips in 2010 and 2012, http://tinyurl.com/ma8vo83. The CIRES Education and Outreach team at the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences at University of Colorado at Boulder and the NOAA Climate.gov team will present results of the new study that used the Quality of Relationship index (awareness, trust, satisfaction, usability, and control mutuality). This index was developed in the previous study and places a new emphasis on the experience of individual users from the four audiences in their regular work or home setting. This new evaluation project used mixed methods, including an online survey, usability studies, phone interviews, and web statistics, providing multiple lines of evidence from which to draw conclusion and recommendations.In the session, we will explore how the NOAA Climate.gov teams used the literature review and new CIRES research to address underlying challenges to achieving the portal's goals. The research in these studies finds that people seek information in ways that are complex and that they do so by consulting a vast array of technologies. Improved and different modes of access to information have, throughout history, been led by technological innovation, but human behavior tends to be
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DEFF Research Database (Denmark)
Climate, and human responses to it, have a strongly interconnected relationship. This when climate change occurs, the result of either natural or human causes, societies should react and adapt to these. But do they? If so, what is the nature of that change, and are the responses positive...... or negative for the long-term survival of social groups? In this volume, scholars from diverse disciplines including archaeology, geology and climate sciences explore scientific and material evidence for climate changes in the past, their causes, their effects on ancient societies and how those societies...
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Struggle against climate change
International Nuclear Information System (INIS)
2009-01-01
This document first proposes a presentation of the cross-cutting policy defined for the struggle against climate change. It notably presents its various programs. It describes the implemented strategy which aims at reducing on a short term greenhouse gas emissions with the available technologies, at making the climate challenge a driver for economic competitiveness, at developing the knowledge on climatic change and at preparing the necessary adaptation measures, and at stating on the international scene the French commitment and its dynamic role in front of the climate challenge
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Methods for assessment of climate variability and climate changes in different time-space scales
International Nuclear Information System (INIS)
Lobanov, V.; Lobanova, H.
2004-01-01
Main problem of hydrology and design support for water projects connects with modern climate change and its impact on hydrological characteristics as observed as well as designed. There are three main stages of this problem: - how to extract a climate variability and climate change from complex hydrological records; - how to assess the contribution of climate change and its significance for the point and area; - how to use the detected climate change for computation of design hydrological characteristics. Design hydrological characteristic is the main generalized information, which is used for water management and design support. First step of a research is a choice of hydrological characteristic, which can be as a traditional one (annual runoff for assessment of water resources, maxima, minima runoff, etc) as well as a new one, which characterizes an intra-annual function or intra-annual runoff distribution. For this aim a linear model has been developed which has two coefficients connected with an amplitude and level (initial conditions) of seasonal function and one parameter, which characterizes an intensity of synoptic and macro-synoptic fluctuations inside a year. Effective statistical methods have been developed for a separation of climate variability and climate change and extraction of homogeneous components of three time scales from observed long-term time series: intra annual, decadal and centural. The first two are connected with climate variability and the last (centural) with climate change. Efficiency of new methods of decomposition and smoothing has been estimated by stochastic modeling and well as on the synthetic examples. For an assessment of contribution and statistical significance of modern climate change components statistical criteria and methods have been used. Next step has been connected with a generalization of the results of detected climate changes over the area and spatial modeling. For determination of homogeneous region with the same
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Climate-society feedbacks and the avoidance of dangerous climate change
Jarvis, A. J.; Leedal, D. T.; Hewitt, C. N.
2012-09-01
The growth in anthropogenic CO2 emissions experienced since the onset of the Industrial Revolution is the most important disturbance operating on the Earth's climate system. To avoid dangerous climate change, future greenhouse-gas emissions will have to deviate from business-as-usual trajectories. This implies that feedback links need to exist between climate change and societal actions. Here, we show that, consciously or otherwise, these feedbacks can be represented by linking global mean temperature change to the growth dynamics of CO2 emissions. We show that the global growth of new renewable sources of energy post-1990 represents a climate-society feedback of ~0.25%yr-1 per degree increase in global mean temperature. We also show that to fulfil the outcomes negotiated in Durban in 2011, society will have to become ~ 50 times more responsive to global mean temperature change than it has been since 1990. If global energy use continues to grow as it has done historically then this would result in amplification of the long-term endogenous rate of decarbonization from -0.6%yr-1 to ~-13%yr-1. It is apparent that modest levels of feedback sensitivity pay large dividends in avoiding climate change but that the marginal return on this effort diminishes rapidly as the required feedback strength increases.
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Climate Prediction - NOAA's National Weather Service
Statistical Models... MOS Prod GFS-LAMP Prod Climate Past Weather Predictions Weather Safety Weather Radio National Weather Service on FaceBook NWS on Facebook NWS Director Home > Climate > Predictions Climate Prediction Long range forecasts across the U.S. Climate Prediction Web Sites Climate Prediction
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International Nuclear Information System (INIS)
2003-01-01
This symposium provided an opportunity for discussions on climate change issues with particular reference to the impacts on Manitoba's water resources. The presentations addressed issues of importance to governments, scientists, academics, managers, consultants and the general public. Topics of discussion ranged from climate change impacts on water quality, wetlands, hydropower, fisheries and drought, to adaptation to climate change. Recent advances in global and regional climate modelling were highlighted along with paleo-environmental indicators of climate change. The objective was to provide a better understanding of the science of climate change. The conference featured 16 presentations of which 1 was indexed separately for inclusion in this database. refs., tabs., figs
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Yukon Government climate change action plan
International Nuclear Information System (INIS)
2009-02-01
This Climate Change Action Plan described the measures that are being taken by the Yukon Government to adapt to, understand, and reduce contributions to climate change. The action plan is the result of input received from more than 100 individuals and organizations and provides clear direction for a strategy that will minimize the negative impacts of climate change and provide economic, social and other environmental benefits through climate change mitigation. The Yukon government has already taken many actions that respond to climate change, such as: developing the Yukon Cold Climate Innovation Centre; supporting the Northern Climate Exchange for public education and outreach; funding community recycling depots and other groups that reduce waste generation, promote public awareness and divert solid waste; and working with provincial and territorial counterparts to enhance national building standards. The main objectives of the climate change actions are to enhance knowledge and understanding of climate change; adapt to climate change; reduce greenhouse gas emissions; and lead Yukon action in response to climate change. tabs., figs.
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Safety climate in Swiss hospital units: Swiss version of the Safety Climate Survey
Gehring, Katrin; Mascherek, Anna C.; Bezzola, Paula
2015-01-01
Abstract Rationale, aims and objectives Safety climate measurements are a broadly used element of improvement initiatives. In order to provide a sound and easy‐to‐administer instrument for the use in Swiss hospitals, we translated the Safety Climate Survey into German and French. Methods After translating the Safety Climate Survey into French and German, a cross‐sectional survey study was conducted with health care professionals (HCPs) in operating room (OR) teams and on OR‐related wards in 10 Swiss hospitals. Validity of the instrument was examined by means of Cronbach's alpha and missing rates of the single items. Item‐descriptive statistics group differences and percentage of ‘problematic responses’ (PPR) were calculated. Results 3153 HCPs completed the survey (response rate: 63.4%). 1308 individuals were excluded from the analyses because of a profession other than doctor or nurse or invalid answers (n = 1845; nurses = 1321, doctors = 523). Internal consistency of the translated Safety Climate Survey was good (Cronbach's alpha G erman = 0.86; Cronbach's alpha F rench = 0.84). Missing rates at item level were rather low (0.23–4.3%). We found significant group differences in safety climate values regarding profession, managerial function, work area and time spent in direct patient care. At item level, 14 out of 21 items showed a PPR higher than 10%. Conclusions Results indicate that the French and German translations of the Safety Climate Survey might be a useful measurement instrument for safety climate in Swiss hospital units. Analyses at item level allow for differentiating facets of safety climate into more positive and critical safety climate aspects. PMID:25656302
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Holzer, M. A.
2013-12-01
Perhaps one of the reasons we have so many climate change deniers in the United States is that to them climate change is not occurring. This is a valid claim about climate change deniers considering that the effects of climate change in the mid-latitudes are quite subtle as compared to those found in low-latitude and high-latitude regions. A mid-latitude classroom teacher is saddled with the challenge of enlightening students about our changing climate and empowering students to assist in making necessary lifestyle changes, all the while the students don't understand the urgency in doing so. Quality climate change data and resources from the Polar Regions and low latitudes, as well as connections to researchers from these regions help to bridge the understanding of our changing climate from the extreme latitudes to the mid-latitudes. Connecting science teachers with data, resources, and researchers is one way of ensuring our mid-latitude students understand the urgency in taking appropriate actions to adapt, mitigate, and show resilience. This presentation will highlight a few of the many impacts of an authentic research experience for teachers that not only provides teachers with data, resources, and researchers, but changes the way a science teacher teaches where the methods they use mirror the methods used by scientists. National projects like PolarTREC connect educators with the science of climate change as well as the reality of impacts of climate change. For example, research expeditions in the Arctic and in Antarctica connect teachers with the content and practices of climate change science preparing them to replicate their experiences with their students. A PolarTREC experience does not end with the close of the expedition. Teachers continue their connections with the program through their educator network, the integration of PolarTREC resources into their curriculums, and communications with their principal investigators either virtually or with school
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Batllori, Enric; Parisien, Marc-André; Parks, Sean A; Moritz, Max A; Miller, Carol
2017-08-01
Ongoing climate change may undermine the effectiveness of protected area networks in preserving the set of biotic components and ecological processes they harbor, thereby jeopardizing their conservation capacity into the future. Metrics of climate change, particularly rates and spatial patterns of climatic alteration, can help assess potential threats. Here, we perform a continent-wide climate change vulnerability assessment whereby we compare the baseline climate of the protected area network in North America (Canada, United States, México-NAM) to the projected end-of-century climate (2071-2100). We estimated the projected pace at which climatic conditions may redistribute across NAM (i.e., climate velocity), and identified future nearest climate analogs to quantify patterns of climate relocation within, among, and outside protected areas. Also, we interpret climatic relocation patterns in terms of associated land-cover types. Our analysis suggests that the conservation capacity of the NAM protection network is likely to be severely compromised by a changing climate. The majority of protected areas (~80%) might be exposed to high rates of climate displacement that could promote important shifts in species abundance or distribution. A small fraction of protected areas (climates that represent analogs of conditions currently characterizing almost a fifth of the protected areas across NAM. However, the majority of nearest climatic analogs for protected areas are in nonprotected locations. Therefore, unprotected landscapes could pose additional threats, beyond climate forcing itself, as sensitive biota may have to migrate farther than what is prescribed by the climate velocity to reach a protected area destination. To mitigate future threats to the conservation capacity of the NAM protected area network, conservation plans will need to capitalize on opportunities provided by the existing availability of natural land-cover types outside the current network of NAM
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Climate Literacy: STEM and Climate Change Education and Remote Sensing Applications
Reddy, S. R.
2015-12-01
NASA Innovations in Climate Education (NICE) is a competitive project to promote climate and Earth system science literacy and seeks to increase the access of underrepresented minority groups to science careers and educational opportunities. A three year funding was received from NASA to partnership with JSU and MSU under cooperative agreement "Strengthening Global Climate Change education through Remote Sensing Application in Coastal Environment using NASA Satellite Data and Models". The goal is to increase the number of highschool and undergraduate students at Jackson State University, a Historically Black University, who are prepared to pursue higher academic degrees and careers in STEM fields. A five Saturday course/workshop was held during March/April 2015 at JSU, focusing on historical and technical concepts of math, enginneering, technology and atmosphere and climate change and remote sensing technology and applications to weather and climate. Nine students from meteorology, biology, industrial technology and computer science/engineering of JSU and 19 high scool students from Jackson Public Schools participated in the course/workshop. The lecture topics include: introduction to remote sensing and GIS, introduction to atmospheric science, math and engineering, climate, introduction to NASA innovations in climate education, introduction to remote sensing technology for bio-geosphere, introduction to earth system science, principles of paleoclimatology and global change, daily weather briefing, satellite image interpretation and so on. In addition to lectures, lab sessions were held for hand-on experiences for remote sensing applications to atmosphere, biosphere, earth system science and climate change using ERDAS/ENVI GIS software and satellite tools. Field trip to Barnett reservoir and National weather Service (NWS) was part of the workshop. Basics of Earth System Science is a non-mathematical introductory course designed for high school seniors, high school
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DEFF Research Database (Denmark)
Papazu, Irina; Scheele, Christian Elling
2014-01-01
This article introduces a device-centred approach to the concept of climate engagement through a qualitative analysis of two websites: www.klimabevidst.dk and www.mapmyclimate.dk. While www.klimabevidst.dk represents a down-to-earth take on individual engagement with the climate, providing users...... with hands-on guides to green home improvements, www.mapmyclimate.dk seeks to increase the user’s awareness of the phenomenon of global climate change by demonstrating how the user’s actions impact the earth’s future. Through conversations with six individuals centred on these green technologies, we...... investigate how the scaling techniques employed by the websites impact the user’s sense of agency vis-à-vis the climate. The analysis suggests that scales can indeed be changed or redefined in a way conducive to climate engagement....
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International Nuclear Information System (INIS)
Jaramillo T, Jose Hernan
2001-01-01
Because the movement of the solar system is periodic, it might think that the climate is periodic also. However we have not the whole information in order to establish if it is periodic and which would be that period. The systematic observation of the climate only began in 1850. For this reason the climate prediction is not very believable. In the probably near future, we will be able to establish the weather with some reasonable inaccuracy. The present work studies the seasonal factors of the climate and it how interacts in its. These factors are: the sun, the atmosphere, the oceans, the water cycle, the clouds, ice sheets and snow and the earth surface. This work we will give an idea why the climate changes and the inaccuracy in the weather prediction
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Itter, Malcolm S; Finley, Andrew O; D'Amato, Anthony W; Foster, Jane R; Bradford, John B
2017-06-01
Changes in the frequency, duration, and severity of climate extremes are forecast to occur under global climate change. The impacts of climate extremes on forest productivity and health remain difficult to predict due to potential interactions with disturbance events and forest dynamics-changes in forest stand composition, density, size and age structure over time. Such interactions may lead to non-linear forest growth responses to climate involving thresholds and lag effects. Understanding how forest dynamics influence growth responses to climate is particularly important given stand structure and composition can be modified through management to increase forest resistance and resilience to climate change. To inform such adaptive management, we develop a hierarchical Bayesian state space model in which climate effects on tree growth are allowed to vary over time and in relation to past climate extremes, disturbance events, and forest dynamics. The model is an important step toward integrating disturbance and forest dynamics into predictions of forest growth responses to climate extremes. We apply the model to a dendrochronology data set from forest stands of varying composition, structure, and development stage in northeastern Minnesota that have experienced extreme climate years and forest tent caterpillar defoliation events. Mean forest growth was most sensitive to water balance variables representing climatic water deficit. Forest growth responses to water deficit were partitioned into responses driven by climatic threshold exceedances and interactions with insect defoliation. Forest growth was both resistant and resilient to climate extremes with the majority of forest growth responses occurring after multiple climatic threshold exceedances across seasons and years. Interactions between climate and disturbance were observed in a subset of years with insect defoliation increasing forest growth sensitivity to water availability. Forest growth was particularly
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Itter, Malcolm S.; Finley, Andrew O.; D'Amato, Anthony W.; Foster, Jane R.; Bradford, John B.
2017-01-01
Changes in the frequency, duration, and severity of climate extremes are forecast to occur under global climate change. The impacts of climate extremes on forest productivity and health remain difficult to predict due to potential interactions with disturbance events and forest dynamics—changes in forest stand composition, density, size and age structure over time. Such interactions may lead to non-linear forest growth responses to climate involving thresholds and lag effects. Understanding how forest dynamics influence growth responses to climate is particularly important given stand structure and composition can be modified through management to increase forest resistance and resilience to climate change. To inform such adaptive management, we develop a hierarchical Bayesian state space model in which climate effects on tree growth are allowed to vary over time and in relation to past climate extremes, disturbance events, and forest dynamics. The model is an important step toward integrating disturbance and forest dynamics into predictions of forest growth responses to climate extremes. We apply the model to a dendrochronology data set from forest stands of varying composition, structure, and development stage in northeastern Minnesota that have experienced extreme climate years and forest tent caterpillar defoliation events. Mean forest growth was most sensitive to water balance variables representing climatic water deficit. Forest growth responses to water deficit were partitioned into responses driven by climatic threshold exceedances and interactions with insect defoliation. Forest growth was both resistant and resilient to climate extremes with the majority of forest growth responses occurring after multiple climatic threshold exceedances across seasons and years. Interactions between climate and disturbance were observed in a subset of years with insect defoliation increasing forest growth sensitivity to water availability. Forest growth was particularly
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Effects of climate variability and climate change on crop production in southern Mali
Traore, B.; Corbeels, M.; Wijk, van M.T.; Rufino, M.C.; Giller, K.E.
2013-01-01
In West Africa predictions of future changes in climate and especially rainfall are highly uncertain, and up to now no long-term analyses are available of the effects of climate on crop production. This study analyses long-term trends in climate variability at N'Tarla and Sikasso in southern Mali
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2011-11-01
With expertise in geography and human health, Marta Jankowska and David López-Carr worked with a team of specialists in climate science, statistics, demography and policy to study climate change impacts on child malnutrition in Mali.
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International Nuclear Information System (INIS)
Masson-Delmotte, V.; Paillard, D.
2004-01-01
We describe briefly here the main mechanisms and time scales involved in natural and anthropogenic climate variability, based on quantitative paleo-climatic reconstructions from natural archives and climate model simulations: the large glacial-interglacial cycles of the last million years (the Quaternary), lasting typically a hundred thousand years, triggered by changes in the solar radiation received by the Earth due to its position around the Sun; the century-long climatic changes occurring during last glacial period and triggered by recurrent iceberg discharges of the large northern hemisphere ice caps, massive freshwater flux to the north Atlantic, and changes in the ocean heat transport. We show the strong coupling between past climatic changes and global biogeochemical cycles, namely here atmospheric greenhouse gases. We also discuss the decadal climatic fluctuations during the last thousand years, showing an unprecedented warming attributed to the anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. We show the range of atmospheric greenhouse concentrations forecasted for the end of the 21. century and the climate model predictions for global temperature changes during the 21. century. We also discuss the possible climatic changes at longer time scales involving the possibility of north Atlantic heat transport collapse (possibility of abrupt climate change), and the duration of the current interglacial period. (author)
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Uncertainty and Climate Change
Berliner, L. Mark
2003-01-01
Anthropogenic, or human-induced, climate change is a critical issue in science and in the affairs of humankind. Though the target of substantial research, the conclusions of climate change studies remain subject to numerous uncertainties. This article presents a very brief review of the basic arguments regarding anthropogenic climate change with particular emphasis on uncertainty.
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Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)
Tirkkonen, J [Tampere Univ. (Finland). Dept. of Regional Studies; Wilenius, M [Helsinki Univ. (Finland). Inst. for Cooperative Studies
1997-12-31
One of the aims of SILMU, the Finnish Research Programme for Climate Change, was to produce information for decision-makers concerning climate change and its mitigation. One integrative project for this purpose was PAATE, an inquiry into the present state and future possibilities of interaction between researchers and decision-makers. The aims of the PAATE project can be summarised as follows: (1) to conduct a survey of the state of climate change research and climate policy in Finland, (2) to develop the interaction between climate research, policy makers and different societal organisations, (3) to acquire methodological experiences on the realisation of projects of this type, (4) to provide material for the final report of the SILMU project and for further action, and (5) to promote the rational development of climate policy. Methodologically, the PAATE project used the Delphi technique employed chiefly in futurological research. A method based on expert knowledge, the Delphi technique assesses the possibilities and conditions of future development through e.g. panel discussions between experts. Also the experiences of the similar project conducted in Netherlands were utilised
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Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)
Tirkkonen, J. [Tampere Univ. (Finland). Dept. of Regional Studies; Wilenius, M. [Helsinki Univ. (Finland). Inst. for Cooperative Studies
1996-12-31
One of the aims of SILMU, the Finnish Research Programme for Climate Change, was to produce information for decision-makers concerning climate change and its mitigation. One integrative project for this purpose was PAATE, an inquiry into the present state and future possibilities of interaction between researchers and decision-makers. The aims of the PAATE project can be summarised as follows: (1) to conduct a survey of the state of climate change research and climate policy in Finland, (2) to develop the interaction between climate research, policy makers and different societal organisations, (3) to acquire methodological experiences on the realisation of projects of this type, (4) to provide material for the final report of the SILMU project and for further action, and (5) to promote the rational development of climate policy. Methodologically, the PAATE project used the Delphi technique employed chiefly in futurological research. A method based on expert knowledge, the Delphi technique assesses the possibilities and conditions of future development through e.g. panel discussions between experts. Also the experiences of the similar project conducted in Netherlands were utilised
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Climate and atmospheric research
International Nuclear Information System (INIS)
Kramer, G.; Schumacher, R.
1992-01-01
This issue of the scientific journal of the Humboldt university is dedicated to results of research work carried out to the greatest extent at the meteorological institute in the last two years on the area of climate and atmospheric research. The traditional research areas of the institute are climatology and the dynamics of the atmosphere, in particular the atmospherical boundary layer. Considering the high probability of a global climatic fluctuation due to the anthropogenic change of composition of the atmosphere and other climate-relevant factors imminent in the next century, climatological research today is an important part of global and regional environmental research. From the necessity of determination and evaluation of the effect of climatic fluctuations on nature and society the contours of a new interdisciplinary research area are already visible now. This is suitable as hardly any other area to be the supporting idea of environmental research at universities. The contributions contained in the issue already consider, in addition to results on climate diagnosis, also results on aspects of climate effect research. (orig./KW) [de
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Climate change research in Canada
International Nuclear Information System (INIS)
Dawson, K.
1994-01-01
The current consensus on climatic change in Canada is briefly summarized, noting the results of modelling of the effects of a doubling of atmospheric CO 2 , the nonuniformity of climate change across the country, the uncertainties in local responses to change, and the general agreement that 2-4 degrees of warming will occur for each doubling of CO 2 . Canadian government response includes programs aimed at reducing the uncertainties in the scientific understanding of climate change and in the socio-economic response to such change. Canadian climate change programs include participation in large-scale experiments on such topics as heat transport in the ocean, and sources and sinks of greenhouse gases; development of next-generation climate models; studying the social and economic effects of climate change in the Great Lakes Basin and Mackenzie River Basin; investigation of paleoclimates; and analysis of climate data for long-term trends
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Climate Projections and Uncertainty Communication.
Joslyn, Susan L; LeClerc, Jared E
2016-01-01
Lingering skepticism about climate change might be due in part to the way climate projections are perceived by members of the public. Variability between scientists' estimates might give the impression that scientists disagree about the fact of climate change rather than about details concerning the extent or timing. Providing uncertainty estimates might clarify that the variability is due in part to quantifiable uncertainty inherent in the prediction process, thereby increasing people's trust in climate projections. This hypothesis was tested in two experiments. Results suggest that including uncertainty estimates along with climate projections leads to an increase in participants' trust in the information. Analyses explored the roles of time, place, demographic differences (e.g., age, gender, education level, political party affiliation), and initial belief in climate change. Implications are discussed in terms of the potential benefit of adding uncertainty estimates to public climate projections. Copyright © 2015 Cognitive Science Society, Inc.
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Strategy for Climate Change Adaptation
DEFF Research Database (Denmark)
Rasmussen, Torben Valdbjørn
2013-01-01
. This absence of an agreement calls for adaptation to climate change. Emphasis should be put on buildings, as they play a vital economic and social role in society and are vulnerable to climate change. Therefore, the building stock deserves its own policy and implementation plans as well as tools that enable...... adequate and cost-efficient adaptation to climate change. This paper explains the need for climate change adaptation of the building stock and suggests a pattern for a strategic approach to how to reach the climate change adaptation needed. The suggested and presented need of a strategic approach is based...... on three main initiatives consisting of the need to examine the potential impacts of climate change on the building stock, the need to assess and develop a roadmap of current and future adaptation measures that can withstand the effects of climate change, and the need to engage relevant stakeholders...
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Strategy for Climate Change Adaptation
DEFF Research Database (Denmark)
Rasmussen, Torben Valdbjørn
2014-01-01
. This absence of an agreement calls for adaptation to climate change. Emphasis should be put on buildings, as they play a vital economic and social role in society and are vulnerable to climate change. Therefore, the building stock deserves its own policy and implementation plans as well as tools that enable...... adequate and cost-efficient adaptation to climate change. This paper explains the need for climate change adaptation of the building stock and suggests a pattern for a strategic approach to how to reach the climate change adaptation needed. The suggested and presented need of a strategic approach is based...... on three main initiatives consisting of the need to examine the potential impacts of climate change on the building stock, the need to assess and develop a roadmap of current and future adaptation measures that can withstand the effects of climate change, and the need to engage relevant stakeholders...
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Local Climate Experts: The Influence of Local TV Weather Information on Climate Change Perceptions.
Bloodhart, Brittany; Maibach, Edward; Myers, Teresa; Zhao, Xiaoquan
2015-01-01
Individuals who identify changes in their local climate are also more likely to report that they have personally experienced global climate change. One way that people may come to recognize that their local climate is changing is through information provided by local TV weather forecasters. Using random digit dialing, 2,000 adult local TV news viewers in Virginia were surveyed to determine whether routine exposure to local TV weather forecasts influences their perceptions of extreme weather in Virginia, and their perceptions about climate change more generally. Results indicate that paying attention to TV weather forecasts is associated with beliefs that extreme weather is becoming more frequent in Virginia, which in turn is associated with stronger beliefs and concerns about climate change. These associations were strongest for individuals who trust their local TV weathercaster as a source of information about climate change, and for those who identify as politically conservative or moderate. The findings add support to the literature suggesting that TV weathercasters can play an important role in educating the public about climate change.
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Local Climate Experts: The Influence of Local TV Weather Information on Climate Change Perceptions
Bloodhart, Brittany; Maibach, Edward; Myers, Teresa; Zhao, Xiaoquan
2015-01-01
Individuals who identify changes in their local climate are also more likely to report that they have personally experienced global climate change. One way that people may come to recognize that their local climate is changing is through information provided by local TV weather forecasters. Using random digit dialing, 2,000 adult local TV news viewers in Virginia were surveyed to determine whether routine exposure to local TV weather forecasts influences their perceptions of extreme weather in Virginia, and their perceptions about climate change more generally. Results indicate that paying attention to TV weather forecasts is associated with beliefs that extreme weather is becoming more frequent in Virginia, which in turn is associated with stronger beliefs and concerns about climate change. These associations were strongest for individuals who trust their local TV weathercaster as a source of information about climate change, and for those who identify as politically conservative or moderate. The findings add support to the literature suggesting that TV weathercasters can play an important role in educating the public about climate change. PMID:26551357
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Estimating daily climatologies for climate indices derived from climate model data and observations
Mahlstein, Irina; Spirig, Christoph; Liniger, Mark A; Appenzeller, Christof
2015-01-01
Climate indices help to describe the past, present, and the future climate. They are usually closer related to possible impacts and are therefore more illustrative to users than simple climate means. Indices are often based on daily data series and thresholds. It is shown that the percentile-based thresholds are sensitive to the method of computation, and so are the climatological daily mean and the daily standard deviation, which are used for bias corrections of daily climate model data. Sample size issues of either the observed reference period or the model data lead to uncertainties in these estimations. A large number of past ensemble seasonal forecasts, called hindcasts, is used to explore these sampling uncertainties and to compare two different approaches. Based on a perfect model approach it is shown that a fitting approach can improve substantially the estimates of daily climatologies of percentile-based thresholds over land areas, as well as the mean and the variability. These improvements are relevant for bias removal in long-range forecasts or predictions of climate indices based on percentile thresholds. But also for climate change studies, the method shows potential for use. Key Points More robust estimates of daily climate characteristics Statistical fitting approach Based on a perfect model approach PMID:26042192
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DEFF Research Database (Denmark)
Hudecz, Adriána
The European Union ROADEX Project 1998 – 2012 was a trans-national roads co-operation aimed at developing ways for interactive and innovative management of low traffic volume roads throughout the cold climate regions of the Northern Periphery Area of Europe. Its goals were to facilitate co......-operation and research into the common problems of the Northern Periphery. This report is an output of the ROADEX “Implementing Accessibility” project (2009-2012). It gives a summary of the results of research into adaptation measures to combat climate change effects on low volume roads in the Northern Periphery...... causes changes in other climatic variables such as rainfall, humidity and wind speed that impact on the functioning of infrastructure such road networks. This paper discusses the climate changes predicted by the world’s meteorological organisations and considers how these may impact on the public...
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Fortini, Lucas B.; Dye, Kaipo
2017-01-01
For many species the threats of climate change occur in a context of multiple existing threats. Given the current focus of global change ecology in identifying and understanding species vulnerable to climate change, we performed a global analysis to characterize the multi-threat context for species threatened by climate change. Utilizing 30,053 species from the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s (IUCN) Red List of Threatened Species, we sought to evaluate if species threatened by climate change are more likely threatened by a greater number of non-climatic threats than species not threatened by climate change. Our results show that species threatened by climate change are generally impacted by 21% more non-climatic threats than species not threatened by climate change. Across all species, this pattern is related to IUCN risk status, where endangered species threatened by climate change face 33% more non-climatic threats than endangered species not threatened by climate change. With the clear challenges of assessing current and projected impacts of climate change on species and ecosystems, research often requires reductionist approaches that result in downplaying this multi-threat context. This cautionary note bears relevance beyond climate change threatened species as we also
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Dowsett, Harry J.; Caballero-Gill, R. P.
2010-01-01
The Pliocene Epoch, 5.3 Ma to 1.8 Ma, was a time when paleoclimate conditions ranged from very warm, equable climates (on a global scale), rhythmically varying every 40,000 years, to high-amplitude glacial-interglacial cycles that led to the “Ice Ages” of the Pleistocene. Evidence for paleoclimate conditions comes from fossils, geochemical data, and the integration of these data with sophisticated numerical models. The Pliocene exhibited a range in atmospheric CO2 concentrations with highs estimated to be at most ~425 ppm in the early Pliocene followed by overall decrease toward preindustrial levels by the close of the Pliocene Epoch (Pagani et al. 2010). Sea levels were estimated to be 25m higher than present day and the size and position of ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica were decidedly different from today. On the other hand, by the mid-Pliocene, the majority of fauna and flora as well as continental configurations were basically the same as today. Man’s ability to adapt to or mitigate the effects of future climate require a deep understanding of the rates and magnitude of future climate change on an ever finer scale. Since conditions projected for the end of this century are not in the human experience, we depend upon a combination of numerical climate models and comparison to analogous conditions in the geologic past. The Pliocene contains what might be the closest analog to climate conditions expected in the near future, and therefore understanding the Pliocene is not only of academic interest but essential for human adaptation.
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Climate Project Screening Tool
Forest Service U.S. Department of Agriculture
2011-01-01
Climate change poses a challenge for resource managers as they review current management practices. Adaptation is a critical means of addressing climate change in the near future because, due to inherent time lags in climate impacts, the effects of increased atmospheric greenhouse gases will be felt for decades even if effective mitigation begins now. To address the...
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Climate change and Finland. Summary of the Finnish research programme on climate change (SILMU)
Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)
NONE
1996-12-31
Anthropogenic impacts on the Earth`s atmosphere are expected to cause significant global climate changes during the next few decades. These changes will have many consequences both in nature and on human activities. In order to investigate the implications of such changes in Finland, a six-year multidisciplinary national research programme on climate and global change, the Finnish Research Programme on Climate Change (SILMU), was initiated in 1990. The key research areas were: (1) quantification of the greenhouse effect and the magnitude of anticipated climate changes, (2) assessment of the effects of changing climate on terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems, and (3) development of mitigation and adaptation strategies
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Climate change and Finland. Summary of the Finnish research programme on climate change (SILMU)
International Nuclear Information System (INIS)
1996-01-01
Anthropogenic impacts on the Earth's atmosphere are expected to cause significant global climate changes during the next few decades. These changes will have many consequences both in nature and on human activities. In order to investigate the implications of such changes in Finland, a six-year multidisciplinary national research programme on climate and global change, the Finnish Research Programme on Climate Change (SILMU), was initiated in 1990. The key research areas were: (1) quantification of the greenhouse effect and the magnitude of anticipated climate changes, (2) assessment of the effects of changing climate on terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems, and (3) development of mitigation and adaptation strategies
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International Nuclear Information System (INIS)
Brekke, L.
2008-01-01
This paper described a web-served public access archive of down-scaled climate projections developed as a tool for water managers of river and hydropower systems. The archive provided access to climate projection data at basin-relevant resolution and included an extensive compilation of down-scale climate projects designed to support risk-based adaptation planning. Downscaled translations of 112 contemporary climate projections produced using the World Climate Research Program's coupled model intercomparison project were also included. Datasets for the coupled model included temperature and precipitation, monthly time-steps, and geographic coverage for the United States and portions of Mexico and Canada. It was concluded that the archive will be used to develop risk-based studies on shifts in seasonal patterns, changes in mean annual runoff, and associated responses in water resources and hydroelectric power management. Case studies demonstrating reclamation applications of archive content and potential applications for hydroelectric power production impacts were included. tabs., figs
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Climate patriots? Concern over climate change and other environmental issues in Australia.
Tranter, Bruce; Lester, Libby
2017-08-01
Echoing the anti-pollution and resource conservation campaigns in the United States in the early-to-mid-twentieth century, some scholars advocate mobilising support for environmental issues by harnessing the notion of environmental patriotism. Taking action to reduce the impact of global warming has also been cast as a patriotic cause. Drawing upon quantitative data from a recent national survey, we examine the link between patriotism and environmental attitudes in Australia, focussing upon climate change. We find that patriotism has a largely neutral association with concern over environmental issues, with the exception of climate change and, to a lesser extent, wildlife preservation. Expressing concern over climate change appears to be unpatriotic for some Australians. Even after controlling for political party identification and other important correlates of environmental issue concerns, patriots are less likely than others to prioritise climate change as their most urgent environmental issue and less likely to believe that climate change is actually occurring.
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Rapley, C.; De Meyer, K.
2014-01-01
There is a gap between the current role of the climate science community and the needs of society. Closing this gap represents a necessary but insufficient step towards improved public discourse and more constructive policy formulation on climate change.
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Lipin, Tan
2016-01-01
Climate change is not only a natural phenomenon, but also a global social issue. Many studies try to explore the mechanisms behind climate change and the consequences of climate change, and provide information for developing the measures to mitigate or adapt to it. For example, the IPCC reviews and assesses climate-change-related scientific information produced worldwide, thus aiming to support decision-making from a scientific perspective. However, though various international and regional c...
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Stanitski, D.; Hatheway, B.; Gardiner, L. S.; Taylor, J.; Chambers, L. H.
2016-12-01
Much of the focus on climate literacy in K-12 occurs in middle and high school, where teachers and students can dig into the science in some depth. It is important, however, to introduce this topic at an early age, building on a child's natural curiosity about the world around them - but without overwhelming them with frightening climate change impacts. In some U.S. school systems, a recent focus on standardized testing has crowded out science instruction in order to bring up literacy scores. To give teachers a resource to maintain some science instruction under these conditions, a series of Elementary GLOBE books have been developed. These fictional stories describe sound science and engineering practices that are essential for students to learn the process of science while expanding literacy skills, strongly encouraged in the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS). The main concepts developed in a new Elementary GLOBE book on climate, titled "What in the World Is Happening to Our Climate?", will be introduced in this presentation. This book complements six other Earth System Science modules within the Elementary GLOBE curriculum and is freely available on the GLOBE website (www.globe.gov/elementaryglobe). The book discusses the concept that climate is changing in different ways and places around the world, and what happens to the climate in one place affects other locations across the globe. Supporting ideas clarify the difference between weather and climate, introduce climate science concepts, reveal the impacts of sea level rise, and help students understand that, while humans are contributing to climate change, they can also participate in solutions that address this challenge. Accompanying teacher's notes and companion classroom activities will be described to help elementary school teachers understand how to approach the subject of climate change with their students.
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Asplund, Therese
2016-01-01
While previous research into understandings of climate change has usually examined general public perceptions, this study offers an audience-specific departure point. This article analyses how Swedish farmers perceive climate change and how they jointly shape their understandings. The agricultural sector is of special interest because it both contributes to and is directly affected by climate change. Through focus group discussions with Swedish farmers, this study finds that (1) farmers relat...
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Climate: some aspects of sceptical criticism; Climat: quelques elements de critique sceptique
Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)
Muller, Ch.
2008-07-01
The author discusses some reasons to be sceptical about the media-supported idea of an actual climate change, and more particularly about the critical role assigned to carbon dioxide in global warming, about the ability to make the distinction between natural and man-induced climate variations, about the quality of models and simulations, about the knowledge on climate physics, about the interpretation of the recently observed warming (since 1997)
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Climatic change during historical times in japan : reconstruction from climatic hazard records
Maejima, Ikuo; Tagami, Yoshio
1986-01-01
A synoptic analysis of climatic hazard records in historical times of Japan is presented. The cool age (7-9c.), the warm age (10-14c.) and the cold age (15-19c.) are indicated. The relationship between summer and winter conditions in the climatic change is also shown. Thus, the knowledge of the climatic change in Japan from the 7th to the 19th century was systematically summarized.
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Building a satellite climate diagnostics data base for real-time climate monitoring
International Nuclear Information System (INIS)
Ropelewski, C.F.
1991-01-01
The paper discusses the development of a data base, the Satellite Climate Diagnostic Data Base (SCDDB), for real time operational climate monitoring utilizing current satellite data. Special attention is given to the satellite-derived quantities useful for monitoring global climate changes, the requirements of SCDDB, and the use of conventional meteorological data and model assimilated data in developing the SCDDB. Examples of prototype SCDDB products are presented. 10 refs
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Gross, John E.; Tercek, Michael; Guay, Kevin; Chang, Tony; Talbert, Marian; Rodman, Ann; Thoma, David; Jantz, Patrick; Morisette, Jeffrey T.
2016-01-01
Most of the western United States is experiencing the effects of rapid and directional climate change (Garfin et al. 2013). These effects, along with forecasts of profound changes in the future, provide strong motivation for resource managers to learn about and prepare for future changes. Climate adaptation plans are based on an understanding of historic climate variation and their effects on ecosystems and on forecasts of future climate trends. Frameworks for climate adaptation thus universally identify the importance of a summary of historical, current, and projected climates (Glick, Stein, and Edelson 2011; Cross et al. 2013; Stein et al. 2014). Trends in physical climate variables are usually the basis for evaluating the exposure component in vulnerability assessments. Thus, this chapter focuses on step 2 of the Climate-Smart Conservation framework (chap. 2): vulnerability assessment. We present analyses of historical and current observations of temperature, precipitation, and other key climate measurements to provide context and a baseline for interpreting the ecological impacts of projected climate changes.
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Climate History and the Modern World
Riebsame, William E.
H. H. Lamb's latest book on the earth's changing climate is a carefully crafted work covering four areas: the physical basis of climate and climate change, the methods of climate reconstruction, the history of climate since the height of the last glaciation, and the impact of climate on human affairs. The book will be of particular interest to three groups. Atmospheric scientists interested in the long history of climate behavior (but perhaps overwhelmed by Lamb's all-encompassing work on the topic, Climate: Past, Present and Future, vol. II, Methuen, New York), will find Climate History and the Modern World to be a good titration of the fuller work. Scientists in other fields, including social scientists grappling with issues of climate-society interaction, will find the book a good entree into the field. Finally, Lamb himself suggests that the book will be useful to resource managers and other decision makers trying to avoid negative climate impacts. With this last audience in mind, no doubt, Lamb has chosen a style that eschews extensive footnoting and references (though sufficient citations are included to lead to further information). This works quite well and seems reasonable in view of his carefully documented previous writings.
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Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)
Maria Carmen Lemos
2014-01-01
Full Text Available This paper examines the role of crop advisors as brokers of climate information to support US corn farmers to adapt to climatic change. It uses quantitative data collected from a broad survey of crop advisors in the US Corn Belt to examine the factors that shape advisors’ use of (and willingness to provide climate information to their clients. Building upon a general model of climate information usability we argue that advisors’ willingness to provide climate advice to farmers is influenced by three main factors: their information seeking habits and behavior, their experience with innovation in the past, and how climate information interplays with other kinds of information that they provide—especially agronomic advice. We find that advisors’ willingness to provide climate related information depends both on factors at the individual and organizational level and on the type of advice they provide. First, at the individual and organizational levels, advisors who work in supportive organizations and who collaborate with other advisors are more likely to provide climate information. Second, advisors are more likely to provide climate information if it does not interfere with their main profit making business (e.g. provision of agronomic advice. Third, there is a significant positive relationship between trust in a greater number or sources of information and use of climate information. Fourth, the way advisors perceive short- and long-term risk also influences their willingness to provide climate information; the more concerned they are about long-term climate-related risks to farming, the more likely they are to provide (or want to provide advice based on climate information. Differently from other empirical work in the literature, our analytical model suggests that neither negative experiences with climate information in the past nor the high level of uncertainty characteristic of climate information appear to influence advisors
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Regional climate service in Southern Germany
Schipper, Janus; Hackenbruch, Julia
2013-04-01
Climate change challenges science, politics, business and society at the international, national and regional level. The South German Climate Office at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) is a contact for the structuring and dissemination of information on climate and climate change in the South German region. It provides scientifically based and user-oriented climate information. Thereby it builds a bridge between the climate sciences and society and provides scientific information on climate change in an understandable way. The expertise of KIT, in which several institutions operate on fundamental and applied climate research, and of partner institutions is the basis for the work in the climate office. The regional focus is on the south of Germany. Thematic focuses are e.g. regional climate modeling, trends in extreme weather events such as heavy rain and hail event, and issues for energy and water management. The South German Climate Office is one of four Regional Helmholtz Climate Offices, of which each has a regional and thematic focus. The users of the Climate Office can be summarized into three categories. First, there is the general public. This category consists mainly of non-professionals. Here, special attention is on an understandable translation of climate information. Attention is paid to application-related aspects, because each individual is affected in a different way by climate change. Typical examples of this category are school groups, citizens and the media. The second category consists of experts of other disciplines. Unlike the first category they are mainly interested in the exchange of results and data. It is important to the climate office to provide support for the use of climatological results. Typical representatives of this category are ministries, state offices, and companies. In the third and final category are scientists. In addition to the climatologists, this category also holds representatives from other scientific
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Climate change: biological and human aspects
Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)
Jonathan Cowie
2007-07-15
The textbook provides a broad review of past, present and likely future climate change from the viewpoints of biology, ecology and human ecology. Contents are: 1. An introduction to climate change; 2. Principal indicators of past climates; 3. Past climate change; 4. The Oligocene to the Quaternary: climate and biology; 5. Present climate and biological change; 6. Current warming and likely future impacts; 7. Human ecology of climate change; 8. Sustainability and policy; Appendix 1. Glossary and acronyms; Appendix 2. Bio-geological timescale; Appendix 3. Calculations of energy demand/supply, and orders of magnitude; Index. 69 figs.
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CSIR Research Space (South Africa)
Atkins, AR
1968-01-01
Full Text Available The design and calibration of an ergometer for exercising subjects during calorimetric studies in the climate chamber, are described. The ergometer is built into the climatic chamber and forms an integral part of the whole instrumentation system foe...
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DEFF Research Database (Denmark)
Nielsen, Jonas Østergaard; D'haen, Sarah Ann Lise
2014-01-01
and the number and types of interviews conducted are, for example, not always clear. Information on crucial aspects of qualitative research like researcher positionality, social positions of key informants, the use of field assistants, language issues and post-fieldwork treatment of data is also lacking in many...... with climate change? On the basis of a literature review of all articles published in Global Environmental Change between 2000 and 2012 that deal with human dimensions of climate change using qualitative methods this paper provides some answers but also raises some concerns. The period and length of fieldwork......There is increasing evidence that climate change will strongly affect people across the globe. Likely impacts of and adaptations to climate change are drawing the attention of researchers from many disciplines. In adaptation research focus is often on perceptions of climate change...
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The Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S): Open Access to a Climate Data Store
Thepaut, Jean-Noel; Dee, Dick
2016-04-01
In November 2014, The European Centre for Medium-range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) signed an agreement with the European Commission to deliver two of the Copernicus Earth Observation Programme Services on the Commission's behalf. The ECMWF delivered services - the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) and Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS) - will bring a consistent standard to how we monitor and predict atmospheric conditions and climate change. They will maximise the potential of past, current and future earth observations - ground, ocean, airborne, satellite - and analyse these to monitor and predict atmospheric conditions and in the future, climate change. With the wealth of free and open data that the services provide, they will help business users to assess the impact of their business decisions and make informed choices, delivering a more energy efficient and climate aware economy. These sound investment decisions now will not only stimulate growth in the short term, but reduce the impact of climate change on the economy and society in the future. C3S is in its proof of concept phase and through its Climate Data Store will provide • global and regional climate data reanalyses; • multi-model seasonal forecasts; • customisable visual data to enable examination of wide range of scenarios and model the impact of changes; • access to all the underlying data, including climate data records from various satellite and in-situ observations. In addition, C3S will provide key indicators on climate change drivers (such as carbon dioxide) and impacts (such as reducing glaciers). The aim of these indicators will be to support European adaptation and mitigation policies in a number of economic sectors. At the heart of the Service is the provision of open access to a one stop shop (the Climate Data Store) of climate data and modelling, analysing more than 20 Essential Climate Variables to build a global picture of our past, present and future climate and developing
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Mixed Messages on Climate Science
Grifo, F.; Gutman, B. L.; Veysey, D.; El Gamal, A.
2011-12-01
While the private sector has a strong interest in climate science, and much at stake as the world comes to terms with the impacts of climate change, their legacy of climate denial has left the public confused. A few companies openly reject the basic science that ties emissions of greenhouse gases from human activities to warming temperatures and other consequences. Many companies play into the confusion by boasting of their green strategies while lobbying against climate bills. Still others joined pro-climate coalitions while donating heavily to politicians who openly reject the science of climate change. Many companies stand to see their business greatly affected by regulations to control greenhouse gas emissions or directly by changing weather patterns, rising sea levels, and varying water availability. Public statements, political activity, and corporate affiliations reveal inconsistent corporate postures. Congress, individuals, and the private sector can all play critical roles in holding corporate America to a higher standard bringing more clarity to science based climate policy discussions.
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Climate change: Recent findings
International Nuclear Information System (INIS)
Hesselmans, G.H.F.M.
1993-08-01
In the late eighties several reports have been published on climate change and sea level rise. In the meantime insights may have changed due to the availability of better and more observations and/or more advanced climate models. The aim of this report is to present the most recent findings with respect to climate change, in particular of sea level rise, storm surges and river peak flows. These climate factors are important for the safety of low-lying areas with respect to coastal erosion and flooding. In the first chapters a short review is presented of a few of the eighties reports. Furthermore, the predictions by state of the art climate models at that time are given. The reports from the eighties should be considered as 'old' information, whereas the IPCC supplement and work, for example, by Wigley should be considered as new information. To assess the latest findings two experts in this field were interviewed: dr J. Oerlemans and dr C.J.E. Schuurmans, a climate expert from the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute (KNMI). Their views are presented together with results published in recent papers on the subject. On the basis of this assessment, the report presents current knowledge regarding predictions of climate change (including sea-level rise) over the next century, together with an assessment of the uncertainties associated with these predictions. 14 figs., 11 tabs., 24 refs
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Twenty first century climate change as simulated by European climate models
International Nuclear Information System (INIS)
Cubasch, Ulrich
2007-01-01
Full text: Climate change simulation results for seven European state-of-the-art climate models, participating in the European research project ENSEMBLES (ENSEMBLE-based Predictions of Climate Changes and their Impacts), will be presented. Models from Norway, France, Germany, Denmark, and Great Britain, representing a sub-ensemble of the models contributing to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Fourth Assessment Report (IPCC AR4), are included. Climate simulations are conducted with all the models for present-day climate and for future climate under the SRES A1B, A2, and B1 scenarios. The design of the simulations follows the guidelines of the IPCC AR4. The 21st century projections are compared to the corresponding present-day simulations. The ensemble mean global mean near surface temperature rise for the year 2099 compared to the 1961-1990 period amounts to 3.2Kforthe A1B scenario, to 4.1 K for the A2 scenario, and to 2.1 K for the B1 scenario. The spatial patterns of temperature change are robust among the contributing models with the largest temperature increase over the Arctic in boreal winter, stronger warming overland than over ocean, and little warming over the southern oceans. The ensemble mean globally averaged precipitation increases for the three scenarios (5.6%, 5.7%, and 3.8% for scenarios A1B, A2, and B1, respectively). The precipitation signals of the different models display a larger spread than the temperature signals. In general, precipitation increases in the Intertropical Convergence Zone and the mid- to high latitudes (most pronounced during the hemispheric winter) and decreases in the subtropics. Sea-level pressure decreases over the polar regions in all models and all scenarios, which is mainly compensated by a pressure increase in the subtropical highs. These changes imply an intensification of the Southern and Northern Annular Modes
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Russia and Global Climate Politics
International Nuclear Information System (INIS)
Tynkkynen, Nina
2014-09-01
Russia, as the fourth largest greenhouse-gas emitter in the world, and a major supplier of fossil fuels causing these emissions, played a decisive role in the enforcement of the Kyoto Protocol, the main instrument of global climate policy so far. Domestically, serious political measures to combat climate change have yet to be taken. Thus, Russia's performance in global climate politics indicates that goals other than genuinely environmental ones, such as political or economic benefits, are the main motivation of Russia's participation. Also, Russia's national pride and its status as a great power are at stake here. This paper scrutinizes Russia's stance in global climate politics, offering an overview of Russia's engagement in international climate politics and its domestic climate policy. In the second part of the paper, Russia's engagement in global environmental politics is discussed in the context of Russia's world status and the great-power concept. Accordingly, the paper aims to shed light on how and why Russia behaves in global climate politics in the way it does. This may be of interest to actors in international environmental politics in general, and relevant to future climate negotiations in particular. (author)
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del Corral, John; Blumenthal, M Benno; Mantilla, Gilma; Ceccato, Pietro; Connor, Stephen J; Thomson, Madeleine C
2012-09-01
Public health professionals are increasingly concerned about the potential impact of climate variability and change on health outcomes. Protecting public health from the vagaries of climate requires new working relationships between the public health sector and the providers of climate data and information. The Climate Information for Public Health Action initiative at the International Research Institute for Climate and Society (IRI) is designed to increase the public health community's capacity to understand, use and demand appropriate climate data and climate information to mitigate the public health impacts of the climate. Significant challenges to building the capacity of health professionals to use climate information in research and decision-making include the difficulties experienced by many in accessing relevant and timely quality controlled data and information in formats that can be readily incorporated into specific analysis with other data sources. We present here the capacities of the IRI climate data library and show how we have used it to build an integrated knowledge system in the support of the use of climate and environmental information in climate-sensitive decision-making with respect to health. Initiated as an aid facilitating exploratory data analysis for climate scientists, the IRI climate data library has emerged as a powerful tool for interdisciplinary researchers focused on topics related to climate impacts on society, including health.
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China's response to climate change issues after Paris Climate Change Conference
Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)
Yun Gao
2016-12-01
Full Text Available The Paris Climate Change Conference was successfully concluded with the Paris Agreement, which is a milestone for the world in collectively combating climate change. By participating in IPCC assessments and conducting national climate change assessments, China has been increasing its understanding of the issue. For the first time, China's top leader attended the Conference of the Parties, which indicates the acknowledgement of the rationality and necessity of climate change response by China at different levels. Moreover, this participation reflects China's commitment to including climate change in its ecology improvement program and pursuing a low-carbon society and economy. In order to ensure the success of the Paris Conference, China has contributed significantly. China's constructive participation in global governance shows that China is a responsible power. These principles such as the creation of a future of win–win cooperation with each country contributing to the best of its ability; a future of the rule of law, fairness, and justice; and a future of inclusiveness, mutual learning, and common development will serve as China's guidelines in its efforts to facilitate the implementation of the Paris Agreement and participate in the design of international systems.
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China's response to climate change issues after Paris Climate Change Conference
Institute of Scientific and Technical Information of China (English)
GAO Yun
2016-01-01
The Paris Climate Change Conference was successfully concluded with the Paris Agreement, which is a milestone for the world in collectively combating climate change. By participating in IPCC assessments and conducting national climate change assessments, China has been increasing its understanding of the issue. For the first time, China's top leader attended the Conference of the Parties, which indicates the acknowledgement of the rationality and necessity of climate change response by China at different levels. Moreover, this participation reflects China's commitment to including climate change in its ecology improvement program and pursuing a low-carbon society and economy. In order to ensure the success of the Paris Conference, China has contributed significantly. China's constructive participation in global governance shows that China is a responsible power. These principles such as the creation of a future of winewin cooperation with each country contributing to the best of its ability;a future of the rule of law, fairness, and justice;and a future of inclusiveness, mutual learning, and common development will serve as China's guidelines in its efforts to facilitate the implementation of the Paris Agreement and participate in the design of international systems.
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Climate Cases: Learning about Student Conceptualizations of Global Climate Change
Tierney, Benjamin P.
2013-01-01
The complex topic of global climate change continues to be a challenging yet important topic among science educators and researchers. This mixed methods study adds to the growing research by investigating student conceptions of climate change from a system theory perspective (Von Bertalanffy, 1968) by asking the question, "How do differences…
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Gomes, Sandra; Deus, Ricardo; Nogueira, Miguel; Viterbo, Pedro; Miranda, Miguel; Antunes, Sílvia; Silva, Alvaro; Miranda, Pedro
2016-04-01
The Portuguese Local Warming Website (http://portaldoclima.pt) has been developed in order to support the society in Portugal in preparing for the adaptation to the ongoing and future effects of climate change. The climate portal provides systematic and easy access to authoritative scientific data ready to be used by a vast and diverse user community from different public and private sectors, key players and decision makers, but also to high school students, contributing to the increase in knowledge and awareness on climate change topics. A comprehensive set of regional climate variables and indicators are computed, explained and graphically presented. Variables and indicators were built in agreement with identified needs after consultation of the relevant social partners from different sectors, including agriculture, water resources, health, environment and energy and also in direct cooperation with the Portuguese National Strategy for Climate Change Adaptation (ENAAC) group. The visual interface allows the user to dynamically interact, explore, quickly analyze and compare, but also to download and import the data and graphics. The climate variables and indicators are computed from state-of-the-art regional climate model (RCM) simulations (e.g., CORDEX project), at high space-temporal detail, allowing to push the limits of the projections down to local administrative regions (NUTS3) and monthly or seasonal periods, promoting local adaptation strategies. The portal provides both historical data (observed and modelled for the 1971-2000 period) and future climate projections for different scenarios (modelled for the 2011-2100 period). A large effort was undertaken in order to quantify the impacts of the risk of extreme events, such as heavy rain and flooding, droughts, heat and cold waves, and fires. Furthermore the different climate scenarios and the ensemble of RCM models, with high temporal (daily) and spatial (~11km) detail, is taken advantage in order to
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Dettenmaier, Megan; Kuhns, Michael; Unger, Bethany; McAvoy, Darren
2017-01-01
This fact sheet describes the complex relationship between forests and climate change based on current research. It explains ways that trees can mitigate some of the risks associated with climate change. It details the impacts that forests are having on the changing climate and discuss specific ways that trees can be used to reduce or counter carbon emissions directly and indirectly.
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Ines, A. V. M.; Han, E.; Baethgen, W.
2017-12-01
Advances in seasonal climate forecasts (SCFs) during the past decades have brought great potential to improve agricultural climate risk managements associated with inter-annual climate variability. In spite of popular uses of crop simulation models in addressing climate risk problems, the models cannot readily take seasonal climate predictions issued in the format of tercile probabilities of most likely rainfall categories (i.e, below-, near- and above-normal). When a skillful SCF is linked with the crop simulation models, the informative climate information can be further translated into actionable agronomic terms and thus better support strategic and tactical decisions. In other words, crop modeling connected with a given SCF allows to simulate "what-if" scenarios with different crop choices or management practices and better inform the decision makers. In this paper, we present a decision support tool, called CAMDT (Climate Agriculture Modeling and Decision Tool), which seamlessly integrates probabilistic SCFs to DSSAT-CSM-Rice model to guide decision-makers in adopting appropriate crop and agricultural water management practices for given climatic conditions. The CAMDT has a functionality to disaggregate a probabilistic SCF into daily weather realizations (either a parametric or non-parametric disaggregation method) and to run DSSAT-CSM-Rice with the disaggregated weather realizations. The convenient graphical user-interface allows easy implementation of several "what-if" scenarios for non-technical users and visualize the results of the scenario runs. In addition, the CAMDT also translates crop model outputs to economic terms once the user provides expected crop price and cost. The CAMDT is a practical tool for real-world applications, specifically for agricultural climate risk management in the Bicol region, Philippines, having a great flexibility for being adapted to other crops or regions in the world. CAMDT GitHub: https://github.com/Agro-Climate/CAMDT
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Climate of the Nation. Australians Attitudes to Climate Change and its Solutions
International Nuclear Information System (INIS)
CLIMATE OF THE NATION AUSTRALIANS ATTITUDES TO CLIMATE CHANGE AND ITS SOLUTIONS
2007-03-01
It comes as no surprise that concern about climate change is at an all time high and the vast majority of people no longer doubt that it is real or that it is caused by greenhouse gases created by human activity. Not only is concern at an all time high, but climate change now ranks as more important to people than a wide range of issues including housing affordability and national security. While many people are still unfamiliar with the more detailed science of climate change, this does not detract from their passion to deal with it. Focus group research shows that people see climate change and weather as interchangeable. As such, drought, water supply and management, and climate change are often linked in the minds of the general public. This is backed up by quantitative polling which has water management and climate change topping people's concerns. A common theme in the research is that people are looking for leadership. They accept there may be a price to pay and they are hungry for decisive action.They are also keen to know more about the problem, and importantly they want to be able to take action which will make a real difference. Support for clean energy solutions like solar and wind is very strong and there is a view that Australia's abundant sunshine is not being put to good use. People also feel strongly about cutting energy waste. Themes that emerged strongly through the research were: growing understanding that climate change is already happening; particular concern about water resources and the impact of water restrictions; a view that Australia should lead and is not yet doing so; concern about our children's future (both jobs and environment). People expressed very strong support for a future in which our children are protected from the worst impacts of climate change and are able to be involved in a new economy built around renewable energy sources. Climate change as an issue is a mixture of economic (including households) management and
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Document on the climate evolutions; Dossier climat ce qui va changer
Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)
Deque, M. [Meteo France 75 - Paris (France); Baruch, J.O.; Theodule, M.L.; Kingler, C.; Thivent, V.; Postel-Vinay, O. [La Recherche, 75 - Paris (France); Leblois, E. [Cemagref, 69 - Lyon (France); Gascard, J.C. [Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), 75 - Paris (France); Quadfasel, D. [Hambourg Univ., Institut d' Oceanographie (Germany)
2006-07-15
What will be the climate in 2050? From specialists, 2050 is the date of the first signs of the climatic change consequences. In France the daily life will not be very modified, but some activities which depend on the hydrology, will have to adapt. The vegetation modifications, will be little in some areas. Elsewhere, they would be radical: no more arctic ice field in summer, some island flooded by the sea. The authors show also the human activities which will be favored by the climatic change. (A.L.B.)
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Climate change experiments in Hamburg
Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)
Gubasch, U [DKRZ, Hamburg (Germany)
1996-12-31
Nowadays the anthropogenic climate change is been simulated world wide with a fair number of coupled ocean atmosphere general circulation models (IPCC, 1995). Typical model problems do not only blur the estimates of the anthropogenic climate change, but they also cause errors in the estimates of the natural variability. An accurate representation of the natural variability of the climate system is, however, essential for the detection of the anthropogenic climate change. All model simulations world wide show, even though they differ considerably in their technical details and the experimental setup and the forcing data, similar amplitudes and pattern of the predicted climate change. In the model world it is already at the beginning of the next century possible to detect the anthropogenic climate change in the global mean. If the model results are applied in a `fingerprint analysis`, then it is possible to prove that the climate change during the last 30 years is with a significance of 95 % larger than any other climate change during the last 100 years. The experiments performed in Hamburg show that the experimental conditions are of great importance for the estimate of the future climate. The usual starting point of most of the simulations with present day conditions (1980-1990) is too late, because then a considerable part of the warming since the beginning of the industrialization (ca. 1750) has been neglected. Furthermore it has only recently become clear that the sulphat-aerosols play an important role in the present day climate and in the future climate. The effect of the sulphat aerosols has first been simulated in a number of equilibrium simulations with mixed layer models, but nowadays with globally coupled ocean-atmosphere circulation models
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Climate change experiments in Hamburg
Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)
Gubasch, U. [DKRZ, Hamburg (Germany)
1995-12-31
Nowadays the anthropogenic climate change is been simulated world wide with a fair number of coupled ocean atmosphere general circulation models (IPCC, 1995). Typical model problems do not only blur the estimates of the anthropogenic climate change, but they also cause errors in the estimates of the natural variability. An accurate representation of the natural variability of the climate system is, however, essential for the detection of the anthropogenic climate change. All model simulations world wide show, even though they differ considerably in their technical details and the experimental setup and the forcing data, similar amplitudes and pattern of the predicted climate change. In the model world it is already at the beginning of the next century possible to detect the anthropogenic climate change in the global mean. If the model results are applied in a `fingerprint analysis`, then it is possible to prove that the climate change during the last 30 years is with a significance of 95 % larger than any other climate change during the last 100 years. The experiments performed in Hamburg show that the experimental conditions are of great importance for the estimate of the future climate. The usual starting point of most of the simulations with present day conditions (1980-1990) is too late, because then a considerable part of the warming since the beginning of the industrialization (ca. 1750) has been neglected. Furthermore it has only recently become clear that the sulphat-aerosols play an important role in the present day climate and in the future climate. The effect of the sulphat aerosols has first been simulated in a number of equilibrium simulations with mixed layer models, but nowadays with globally coupled ocean-atmosphere circulation models
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Impact of Climate Change on Drylands. Climate variability, livelihood strategies and policy options
Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)
Verhagen, A. [Plant Research International, Wageningen (Netherlands); Dietz, A.J. [Amsterdam Research Institute for Global Issues and Development Studies AGIDS, University of Amsterdam UvA, Amsterdam (Netherlands)
2001-09-01
The findings of the Impact of Climate Change on Drylands (ICCD) project were discussed during a workshop held on 26 and 27 April 2001. The aims of the workshop were to disseminate the findings of the ICCD project, create awareness of the possible effects of climate change and contribute to the dialogue on climate change research in West Africa. Both the workshop and the project were financed by the National Research Programme on Global Air Pollution and Climate Change (NRP), Centre Technique de Cooperation de Agricole et Rurale (CTA), Wageningen University (INREF), and Amsterdam Research Institute for Global Issues and Development Studies (AGIDS)
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International Nuclear Information System (INIS)
1993-07-01
Climate impact assessment is a new field of research which, owing to international and national efforts to understand and cope with the impending global climate changes on a global, regional and local level, has rapidly become a central field of research of the Federal Ministry of Research and Technology. In contrast to other countries, Germany had no research facilities and infrastructure that could be used. The Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research was to provide the infrastructure basis for climate impact research in Germany. The Institute was founded by the BMFT and the Land of Brandenburg. (orig.) [de
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Climatic change and impacts: a general introduction
International Nuclear Information System (INIS)
Fantechi, R.; Almeida-Teixeira, M.E.; Maracchi, G.
1991-01-01
These proceedings are divided into six parts containing 29 technical papers. 1. An Overview of the Climatic System, 2. Past climate Changes, 3. Climate Processes and Climate Modelling, 4. Greenhouse Gas Induced Climate Change, 5. Climatic Impacts, 6. STUDENTS' PAPERS
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Harbert, Robert S; Nixon, Kevin C
2015-08-01
• Plant distributions have long been understood to be correlated with the environmental conditions to which species are adapted. Climate is one of the major components driving species distributions. Therefore, it is expected that the plants coexisting in a community are reflective of the local environment, particularly climate.• Presented here is a method for the estimation of climate from local plant species coexistence data. The method, Climate Reconstruction Analysis using Coexistence Likelihood Estimation (CRACLE), is a likelihood-based method that employs specimen collection data at a global scale for the inference of species climate tolerance. CRACLE calculates the maximum joint likelihood of coexistence given individual species climate tolerance characterization to estimate the expected climate.• Plant distribution data for more than 4000 species were used to show that this method accurately infers expected climate profiles for 165 sites with diverse climatic conditions. Estimates differ from the WorldClim global climate model by less than 1.5°C on average for mean annual temperature and less than ∼250 mm for mean annual precipitation. This is a significant improvement upon other plant-based climate-proxy methods.• CRACLE validates long hypothesized interactions between climate and local associations of plant species. Furthermore, CRACLE successfully estimates climate that is consistent with the widely used WorldClim model and therefore may be applied to the quantitative estimation of paleoclimate in future studies. © 2015 Botanical Society of America, Inc.
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Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)
J. Heinke
2013-10-01
Full Text Available In the ongoing political debate on climate change, global mean temperature change (ΔTglob has become the yardstick by which mitigation costs, impacts from unavoided climate change, and adaptation requirements are discussed. For a scientifically informed discourse along these lines, systematic assessments of climate change impacts as a function of ΔTglob are required. The current availability of climate change scenarios constrains this type of assessment to a narrow range of temperature change and/or a reduced ensemble of climate models. Here, a newly composed dataset of climate change scenarios is presented that addresses the specific requirements for global assessments of climate change impacts as a function of ΔTglob. A pattern-scaling approach is applied to extract generalised patterns of spatially explicit change in temperature, precipitation and cloudiness from 19 Atmosphere–Ocean General Circulation Models (AOGCMs. The patterns are combined with scenarios of global mean temperature increase obtained from the reduced-complexity climate model MAGICC6 to create climate scenarios covering warming levels from 1.5 to 5 degrees above pre-industrial levels around the year 2100. The patterns are shown to sufficiently maintain the original AOGCMs' climate change properties, even though they, necessarily, utilise a simplified relationships between ΔTglob and changes in local climate properties. The dataset (made available online upon final publication of this paper facilitates systematic analyses of climate change impacts as it covers a wider and finer-spaced range of climate change scenarios than the original AOGCM simulations.
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Pousette, Anders; Larsman, Pernilla; Eklöf, Mats; Törner, Marianne
2017-06-01
Patient safety climate/culture is attracting increasing research interest, but there is little research on its relation with organizational climates regarding other target domains. The aim of this study was to investigate the relationship between patient safety climate and occupational safety climate in healthcare. The climates were assessed using two questionnaires: Hospital Survey on Patient Safety Culture and Nordic Occupational Safety Climate Questionnaire. The final sample consisted of 1154 nurses, 886 assistant nurses, and 324 physicians, organized in 150 work units, within hospitals (117units), primary healthcare (5units) and elderly care (28units) in western Sweden, which represented 56% of the original sample contacted. Within each type of safety climate, two global dimensions were confirmed in a higher order factor analysis; one with an external focus relative the own unit, and one with an internal focus. Two methods were used to estimate the covariation between the global climate dimensions, in order to minimize the influence of bias from common method variance. First multilevel analysis was used for partitioning variances and covariances in a within unit part (individual level) and a between unit part (unit level). Second, a split sample technique was used to calculate unit level correlations based on aggregated observations from different respondents. Both methods showed associations similar in strength between the patient safety climate and the occupational safety climate domains. The results indicated that patient safety climate and occupational safety climate are strongly positively related at the unit level, and that the same organizational processes may be important for the development of both types of organizational climate. Safety improvement interventions should not be separated in different organizational processes, but be planned so that both patient safety and staff safety are considered concomitantly. Copyright © 2017 National Safety
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Natural and anthropogenic climate change
International Nuclear Information System (INIS)
Ko, M.K.W.; Clough, S.A.; Molnar, G.I.; Iacono, M.; Wang, W.C.; State Univ. of New York, Albany, NY
1992-03-01
This report consists of two parts: (1) progress for the period 9/1/91--3/31/92 and (2) the plan for the remaining period 4/1/92--8/31/92. The project includes two tasks: atmospheric radiation and improvement of climate models to evaluate the climatic effects of radiation changes. The atmospheric radiation task includes four subtasks: (1) Intercomparison of Radiation Codes in Climate Models (ICRCCM), (2) analysis of the water vapor continuum using line-by-line calculations to develop a parameterization for use in climate models, (3) parameterization of longwave radiation and (4) climate/radiation interactions of desert aerosols. Our effort in this period is focused on the first three subtasks. The improvement of climate models to evaluate the subtasks: (1) general circulation model study and (2) 2- D model development and application
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The development and climate nexus
DEFF Research Database (Denmark)
Davidson, O.; Halsnæs, K.; Huq, S.
2003-01-01
the 'development first approach', in which a future climate regime should focus on development strategies with ancillary climate benefits and increase the capability of developing countries to implement these. This is anticipated to offer a possible positive way out of the current deadlock between North and South......This paper explores an alternative approach to future climate policies in developing countries. Although climate change seems marginal compared to the pressing issues of poverty alleviation and economic development, it is becoming clear that the realisation of development goals may be hampered...... by climate change. However, development can be shaped in such a way as to achieve its goals and at the same time reduce vulnerability to climate change, thereby facilitating sustainable development that realises economic, social, local and global environmental goals. This approach has been coined...
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Changing Climates @ Colorado State: 100 (Multidisciplinary) Views of Climate Change
Campbell, S.; Calderazzo, J.; Changing Climates, Cmmap Education; Diversity Team
2011-12-01
We would like to talk about a multidisciplinary education and outreach program we co-direct at Colorado State University, with support from an NSF-funded STC, CMMAP, the Center for Multiscale Modeling of Atmospheric Processes. We are working to raise public literacy about climate change by providing information that is high quality, up to date, thoroughly multidisciplinary, and easy for non-specialists to understand. Our primary audiences are college-level students, their teachers, and the general public. Our motto is Climate Change is Everybody's Business. To encourage and help our faculty infuse climate-change content into their courses, we have organized some 115 talks given by as many different speakers-speakers drawn from 28 academic departments, all 8 colleges at CSU, and numerous other entities from campus, the community, and farther afield. We began with a faculty-teaching-faculty series and then broadened our attentions to the whole campus and surrounding community. Some talks have been for narrowly focused audiences such as extension agents who work on energy, but most are for more eclectic groups of students, staff, faculty, and citizens. We count heads at most events, and our current total is roughly 6,000. We have created a website (http://changingclimates.colostate.edu) that includes videotapes of many of these talks, short videos we have created, and annotated sources that we judge to be accurate, interesting, clearly written, and aimed at non-specialists, including books, articles and essays, websites, and a few items specifically for college teachers (such as syllabi). Pages of the website focus on such topics as how the climate works / how it changes; what's happening / what might happen; natural ecosystems; agriculture; impacts on people; responses from ethics, art, literature; communication; daily life; policy; energy; and-pulling all the pieces together-the big picture. We have begun working on a new series of very short videos that can be
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Regional climate change scenarios
International Nuclear Information System (INIS)
Somot, S.
2005-01-01
Because studies of the regional impact of climate change need higher spatial resolution than that obtained in standard global climate change scenarios, developing regional scenarios from models is a crucial goal for the climate modelling community. The zoom capacity of ARPEGE-Climat, the Meteo-France climate model, allows use of scenarios with a horizontal resolution of about 50 km over France and the Mediterranean basin. An IPCC-A2 scenario for the end of the 21. century in France shows higher temperatures in each season and more winter and less summer precipitation than now. Tuning the modelled statistical distributions to observed temperature and precipitation allows us to study changes in the frequency of extreme events between today's climate and that at the end of century. The frequency of very hot days in summer will increase. In particular, the frequency of days with a maximum temperature above 35 deg C will be multiplied by a factor of 10, on average. In our scenario, the Toulouse area and Provence might see one quarter of their summer days with a maximum temperature above 35 deg C. (author)
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Organizational climate and culture.
Schneider, Benjamin; Ehrhart, Mark G; Macey, William H
2013-01-01
Organizational climate and organizational culture theory and research are reviewed. The article is first framed with definitions of the constructs, and preliminary thoughts on their interrelationships are noted. Organizational climate is briefly defined as the meanings people attach to interrelated bundles of experiences they have at work. Organizational culture is briefly defined as the basic assumptions about the world and the values that guide life in organizations. A brief history of climate research is presented, followed by the major accomplishments in research on the topic with regard to levels issues, the foci of climate research, and studies of climate strength. A brief overview of the more recent study of organizational culture is then introduced, followed by samples of important thinking and research on the roles of leadership and national culture in understanding organizational culture and performance and culture as a moderator variable in research in organizational behavior. The final section of the article proposes an integration of climate and culture thinking and research and concludes with practical implications for the management of effective contemporary organizations. Throughout, recommendations are made for additional thinking and research.
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Getting The Picture: Our Changing Climate- A new learning tool for climate science
Yager, K.; Balog, J. D.
2014-12-01
Earth Vision Trust (EVT), founded by James Balog- photographer and scientist, has developed a free, online, multimedia climate science education tool for students and educators. Getting The Picture (GTP) creates a new learning experience, drawing upon powerful archives of Extreme Ice Survey's unique photographs and time-lapse videos of changing glaciers around the world. GTP combines the latest in climate science through interactive tools that make the basic scientific tenets of climate science accessible and easy to understand. The aim is to use a multidisciplinary approach to encourage critical thinking about the way our planet is changing due to anthropogenic activities, and to inspire students to find their own voice regarding our changing climate The essence of this resource is storytelling through the use of inspiring images, field expedition notes and dynamic multimedia tools. EVT presents climate education in a new light, illustrating the complex interaction between humans and nature through their Art + Science approach. The overarching goal is to educate and empower young people to take personal action. GTP is aligned with national educational and science standards (NGSS, CCSS, Climate Literacy) so it may be used in conventional classrooms as well as education centers, museum kiosks or anywhere with Internet access. Getting The Picture extends far beyond traditional learning to provide an engaging experience for students, educators and all those who wish to explore the latest in climate science.
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CERN. Geneva
2009-01-01
The current understanding of climate change in the industrial age is that it is predominantly caused by anthropogenic greenhouse gases, with relatively small natural contributions due to solar irradiance and volcanoes. However, palaeoclimatic reconstructions show that the climate has frequently varied on 100-year time scales during the Holocene (last 10 kyr) by amounts comparable to the present warming - and yet the mechanism or mechanisms are not understood. Some of these reconstructions show clear associations with solar variability, which is recorded in the light radio-isotope archives that measure past variations of cosmic ray intensity. However, despite the increasing evidence of its importance, solar-climate variability is likely to remain controversial until a physical mechanism is established. Estimated changes of solar irradiance on these time scales appear to be too small to account for the climate observations. This raises the question of whether cosmic rays may directly affect the climate, provi...
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Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)
Jessica E. Halofsky
2018-04-01
Full Text Available The Blue Mountains Adaptation Partnership (BMAP was established to increase climate change awareness, assess vulnerability to climate change, and develop science-based adaptation strategies for national forest lands in the Blue Mountains region of northeast Oregon and southeast Washington (USA. The BMAP process included (1 development of a science-management partnership, (2 a vulnerability assessment of the effects of climate change on natural resources and infrastructure, (3 development of adaptation options that will help reduce negative effects of climate change and assist the transition of biological systems and management to a changing climate, and (4 ongoing dialogue and activities related to climate change in the Blue Mountains region. This special issue of Climate Services describes social context and climate change vulnerability assessments for water use and infrastructure, vegetation, and riparian ecosystems of the Blue Mountains region, as well as adaptation options for natural resource management. This manuscript introduces the special issue, describing the management, biogeographic, and climatic context for the Blue Mountains region; the climate change vulnerability assessment and adaptation process used in BMAP; and the potential applications of the information described in the special issue. Although the institutional focus of information in the special issue is U.S. Forest Service lands (Malheur, Umatilla, and Wallowa-Whitman National Forests, the broader social context and adaptation options should be applicable to other lands throughout this region and the Pacific Northwest. Keywords: Climate change adaptation, Pacific Northwest, Resource management, Vulnerability assessment, Blue Mountains
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The time scales of the climate-economy feedback and the climatic cost of growth
Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)
Hallegatte, Stephane [CIRED - CNRM, Nogent-sur-Marne (France)
2005-04-01
This paper is based on the perception that the inertia of climate and socio-economic systems are key parameters in the climate change issue. In a first part, it develops and implements a new approach based on a simple integrated model with a particular focus on an innovative transient impact and adaptation modelling. In a second part, a climate-economy feedback is defined and characterized. It is found that: (i) it has a 70-year characteristic time, which is long when compared to the system's other time-scales, and it cannot act as a natural damping process of climate change; (ii) mitigation has to be anticipated since the feedback of an emission reduction on the economy is significant only after a 20-year delay and really efficient after a one-century delay; (iii) the IPCC methodology, that neglects the feedback from impacts to emissions, is acceptable up to 2100, whatever is the level of impacts. This analysis allows also to define a climatic cost of growth as the additional climate change damages due to the additional emissions linked to economic growth. Usefully, this metric for climate change damages is particularly independent of the baseline scenario. (orig.)
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The time scales of the climate-economy feedback and the climatic cost of growth
International Nuclear Information System (INIS)
Hallegatte, Stephane
2005-04-01
This paper is based on the perception that the inertia of climate and socio-economic systems are key parameters in the climate change issue. In a first part, it develops and implements a new approach based on a simple integrated model with a particular focus on an innovative transient impact and adaptation modelling. In a second part, a climate-economy feedback is defined and characterized. It is found that: (i) it has a 70-year characteristic time, which is long when compared to the system's other time-scales, and it cannot act as a natural damping process of climate change; (ii) mitigation has to be anticipated since the feedback of an emission reduction on the economy is significant only after a 20-year delay and really efficient after a one-century delay; (iii) the IPCC methodology, that neglects the feedback from impacts to emissions, is acceptable up to 2100, whatever is the level of impacts. This analysis allows also to define a climatic cost of growth as the additional climate change damages due to the additional emissions linked to economic growth. Usefully, this metric for climate change damages is particularly independent of the baseline scenario. (orig.)
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Garfin, G. M.; Brugger, J.; Gordon, E. S.; Barsugli, J. J.; Rangwala, I.; Travis, W.
2015-12-01
For more than a decade, stakeholder needs assessments and reports, including the recent National Climate Assessment, have pointed out the need for climate "science translators" or "science integrators" who can help bridge the gap between the cultures and contexts of researchers and decision-makers. Integration is important for exchanging and enhancing knowledge, building capacity to use climate information in decision making, and fostering more robust planning for decision-making in the context of climate change. This talk will report on the characteristics of successful climate science integrators, and a variety of models for training the upcoming generation of climate science integrators. Science integration characteristics identified by an experienced vanguard in the U.S. include maintaining credibility in both the scientific and stakeholder communities, a basic respect for stakeholders demonstrated through active listening, and a deep understanding of the decision-making context. Drawing upon the lessons of training programs for Cooperative Extension, public health professionals, and natural resource managers, we offer ideas about training next generation climate science integrators. Our model combines training and development of skills in interpersonal relations, communication of science, project implementation, education techniques and practices - integrated with a strong foundation in disciplinary knowledge.
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Control of climate and litter quality on leaf litter decomposition in different climatic zones.
Zhang, Xinyue; Wang, Wei
2015-09-01
Climate and initial litter quality are the major factors influencing decomposition rates on large scales. We established a comprehensive database of terrestrial leaf litter decomposition, including 785 datasets, to examine the relationship between climate and litter quality and evaluate the factors controlling decomposition on a global scale, the arid and semi-arid (AS) zone, the humid middle and humid low (HL) latitude zones. Initial litter nitrogen (N) and phosphorus (P) concentration only increased with mean annual temperature (MAT) in the AS zone and decreased with mean annual precipitation (MAP) in the HL zone. Compared with nutrient content, MAT imposed less effect on initial litter lignin content than MAP. MAT were the most important decomposition driving factors on a global scale as well as in different climatic zones. MAP only significantly affected decomposition constants in AS zone. Although litter quality parameters also showed significant influence on decomposition, their importance was less than the climatic factors. Besides, different litter quality parameters exerted significant influence on decomposition in different climatic zones. Our results emphasized that climate consistently exerted important effects on decomposition constants across different climatic zones.
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Niepold, F.
2012-12-01
Societal concern about the impacts of climate change is growing. Citizens in public and private sectors want easy access to credible climate science information to help them make informed decisions affecting their lives and livelihoods. Weather and climate influences almost every sector of society, and affects up to 40 percent of the United States' 10 trillion annual economy. (NRC report, 2003 entitled "Satellite Observations of the Earth's Environment: Accelerating the Transition of Research to Operations"). As the leading provider of climate, weather, and water information to the nation and the world, NOAA is a logical source for citizens to turn to for climate information. NOAA must expand and improve the way it communicates, educates, reaches out to, and engages with public stakeholders to better meet the nation's needs for timely, authoritative climate data and information. Citizens are increasingly going online to seek credible, authoritative climate information. However, users report having difficulty locating and using NOAA's online data products and services. Thus, resolving this online accessibility issue will be one of the Climate Portal's main benefits. The use of portal technology and emerging data integration and visualization tools provide an opportunity for NOAA to bring together multiple datasets from diverse disciplines and sources to deliver a more comprehensive picture of climate in the context of affected resources, communities and businesses. Additional benefits include wider extension of NOAA's data to other media such as television and free-choice learning venues, thereby increasing public exposure and engagement. The Climate Portal teams take an audience-focused approach to promoting climate science literacy among the public. The program communicates the challenges, processes, and results of NOAA-supported climate science through stories and data visualizations on the Web and in popular media. They provide information to a range of
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International Nuclear Information System (INIS)
Duplessy, J.C.; Pons, A.; Fantechi, R.
1991-01-01
The present volume contains the lessons delivered at the course held in Arles, France, on the subject Climate and Global Change: natural variability of the geosphere and biosphere systems, biogeochemical cycles and their perturbation by human activities, monitoring and forecasting global changes (satellite observations, modelling,...). Short presentations of students' own research activities are also proposed (climatic fluctuation in the Mediterranean area, climate/vegetation relations, etc.)
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Li, Xiu Fen; Zhao, Hui Ying; Zhu, Hai Xia; Wang, Ping; Wang, Qiu Jing; Wang, Ming; Li, Yu Guang
2016-08-01
Under the background of climate change, revealing the change trend and spatial diffe-rence of maize climate productivity in-depth and understanding the regularity of maize climatic resources utilization can provide scientific basis for the macro-decision of agricultural production in Heilongjiang Province. Based on the 1981-2014 meteorological data of 72 weather stations and the corresponding maize yield data in Heilongjiang Province, by the methods of step by step revisal, spatial interpolation and linear trend analysis, this paper studied the photosynthetic productivity (PP), light-temperature productivity (LTP), and climatic productivity (CP) of spring maize, and their temporal and spatial variation characteristics, main influencing factors and light energy utilization efficiency, and evaluated the maize climate productivities under different climate scenarios in the future. The results showed that during the study period, the mean PP, LTP and CP in Heilongjiang Province were 26558, 19953, 18742 kg·hm -2 , respectively. Maize PP, LTP and CP were high in plains and low in mountains, and gradually decreased from southwest to northeast. PP, LTP and CP presented significantly increasing trends, and the increase rates were 378, 723 and 560 kg·hm -2 ·(10 a) -1 , respectively. The increase of radiation and temperature had positive effect on maize production in Heilongjiang Province. The potential productivity of maize presented significant response to climate change. The decrease of solar radiation led to the decline of PP in western Songnen Plain, but the increased temperature compensated the negative effect of solar radiation, so the downward trend of LTP was slowed. The response to climate warming was particularly evident in North and East, and LTP was significantly increased, which was sensitive to the change of precipitation in southwest of Songnen Plain and part of Sanjiang Plain. The average ratio of maize actual yield to its climate productivity was only 24
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Mediterranean climate modelling: variability and climate change scenarios
International Nuclear Information System (INIS)
Somot, S.
2005-12-01
Air-sea fluxes, open-sea deep convection and cyclo-genesis are studied in the Mediterranean with the development of a regional coupled model (AORCM). It accurately simulates these processes and their climate variabilities are quantified and studied. The regional coupling shows a significant impact on the number of winter intense cyclo-genesis as well as on associated air-sea fluxes and precipitation. A lower inter-annual variability than in non-coupled models is simulated for fluxes and deep convection. The feedbacks driving this variability are understood. The climate change response is then analysed for the 21. century with the non-coupled models: cyclo-genesis decreases, associated precipitation increases in spring and autumn and decreases in summer. Moreover, a warming and salting of the Mediterranean as well as a strong weakening of its thermohaline circulation occur. This study also concludes with the necessity of using AORCMs to assess climate change impacts on the Mediterranean. (author)
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Climate: Into the 21st Century
Burroughs, William
2003-08-01
Toward the end of the twentieth century, it became evident to professionals working within the meterological arena that the world's climate system was showing signs of change that could not be adequately explained in terms of natural variation. Since that time there has been an increasing recognition that the climate system is changing as a result of human industries and lifestyles, and that the outcomes may prove catastrophic to the world's escalating population. Compiled by an international team formed under the auspices of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), Climate: Into the 21st Century features an unrivalled collection of essays by the world's leading meteorological experts. These fully integrated contributions provide a perspective of the global climate system across the twentieth century, and describe some of the most arresting and extreme climatic events and their effects that have occurred during that time. In addition, the book traces the development of our capabilities to observe and monitor the climate system, and outlines our understanding of the predictability of climate on time-scales of months and longer. It concludes with a summary of the prospects for applying the twentieth century climate experience in order to benefit society in the twenty-first century. Lavishly illustrated in color, Climate is an accessible acccount of the challenges that climate poses at the start of the twenty-first century. Filled with fascinating facts and diagrams, it is written for a wide audience and will captivate the general reader interested in climate issues, and will be a valuable teaching resource. William Burroughs is a successful science author of books on climate, including Weather (Time Life, 2000), and Climate Change: A Multidisciplinary Approach (2001), Does the Weather Really Matter? (1997) and The Climate Revealed (1999), all published by Cambridge University Press.
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Gordova, Yulia; Okladnikov, Igor; Titov, Alexander; Gordov, Evgeny
2016-04-01
While there is a strong demand for innovation in digital learning, available training programs in the environmental sciences have no time to adapt to rapid changes in the domain content. A joint group of scientists and university teachers develops and implements an educational environment for new learning experiences in basics of climatic science and its applications. This so-called virtual learning laboratory "Climate" contains educational materials and interactive training courses developed to provide undergraduate and graduate students with profound understanding of changes in regional climate and environment. The main feature of this Laboratory is that students perform their computational tasks on climate modeling and evaluation and assessment of climate change using the typical tools of the "Climate" information-computational system, which are usually used by real-life practitioners performing such kind of research. Students have an opportunity to perform computational laboratory works using information-computational tools of the system and improve skills of their usage simultaneously with mastering the subject. We did not create an artificial learning environment to pass the trainings. On the contrary, the main purpose of association of the educational block and computational information system was to familiarize students with the real existing technologies for monitoring and analysis of data on the state of the climate. Trainings are based on technologies and procedures which are typical for Earth system sciences. Educational courses are designed to permit students to conduct their own investigations of ongoing and future climate changes in a manner that is essentially identical to the techniques used by national and international climate research organizations. All trainings are supported by lectures, devoted to the basic aspects of modern climatology, including analysis of current climate change and its possible impacts ensuring effective links between
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Boykoff, M. T.
2012-12-01
Since the 1980s, a keystone species called 'climate contrarians' has emerged and thrived. Through resistance to dominant interpretations of scientific evidence, and often outlier views on optimal responses to climate threats, contrarians have raised many meta-level questions: for instance, questions involve to what extent have their varied interventions been effective in terms of sparking a new and wise Copernican revolution; or do their amplified voices instead service entrenched carbon-based industry interests while they blend debates over 'climate change' with other culture wars? While the value of their influence has generated numerous debates, there is no doubt that climate contrarians have had significant influence on climate science, policy and public communities in ways that are larger than would be expected from their relative abundance in society. As such, a number of these actors have achieved 'celebrity status' in science-policy circles, and, at times, larger public spaces. This presentation focuses on how - particularly through amplified mass media attention to their movements - various outlier interventions have demonstrated themselves to be (often deliberately) detrimental to efforts that seek to enlarge rather than constrict the spectrum of possibility for mobilizing appropriate responses to ongoing climate challenges. Also, this work analyses the growth pathways of these charismatic megafauna through interview data and participant observations completed by the author at the 2011 Heartland Institute's Sixth International Conference on Climate Change. This provides detail on how outlier perspectives characterized as climate contrarians do work in these spaces under the guise of public intellectualism to achieve intended goals and objectives. The research undertaken and related in the presentation here seeks to better understand motivations that prop up these contrarian stances, such as possible ideological or evidentiary disagreement to the orthodox
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International Nuclear Information System (INIS)
2001-01-01
Sweden's national communication to the UN Convention on Climate Change describes everything about the emission and absorption of greenhouse gases, the motives and forces behind emissions, and official Swedish climate policies. Every five years, Sweden submits a communication on practical climate efforts in Sweden to the UN Convention on Climate Change. The Swedish Environmental Protection Board has coordinated the work of producing the basic documentation for the communication, which also describes the measures already taken and those planned for the future. In addition, scenarios have been adopted for developments in Swedish greenhouse gas emissions, Sweden's vulnerability and Swedish research into the climate and climate change
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Climate Change Action Fund: public education and outreach. Change: think climate
International Nuclear Information System (INIS)
2001-05-01
This illustrated booklet provides a glimpse of the many creative approaches being adopted by educators, community groups, industry associations and governments at all levels to inform Canadians about the causes and effects of climate change. It also provides suggestions about how each individual person can contribute to reduce greenhouse gas emissions through residential energy efficiency, by participating in ride-share programs, by planting trees and a myriad of other community action projects and public awareness campaigns. The booklet describes educational resources and training available to teachers, science presentations, climate change workshops, public awareness initiatives, community action on climate change, and sector-specific actions underway in the field of transportation and in improving energy efficiency in residential and large buildings. Descriptive summaries of the activities of organizations involved in climate change advocacy and promotion, and a list of contacts for individual projects also form part of the volume
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Choi, H. S.; Schneider, U.; Schmid, E.; Held, H.
2012-04-01
Changes to climate variability and frequency of extreme weather events are expected to impose damages to the agricultural sector. Seasonal forecasting and long range prediction skills have received attention as an option to adapt to climate change because seasonal climate and yield predictions could improve farmers' management decisions. The value of seasonal forecasting skill is assessed with a crop mix adaptation option in Spain where drought conditions are prevalent. Yield impacts of climate are simulated for six crops (wheat, barely, cotton, potato, corn and rice) with the EPIC (Environmental Policy Integrated Climate) model. Daily weather data over the period 1961 to 1990 are used and are generated by the regional climate model REMO as reference period for climate projection. Climate information and its consequent yield variability information are given to the stochastic agricultural sector model to calculate the value of climate information in the agricultural market. Expected consumers' market surplus and producers' revenue is compared with and without employing climate forecast information. We find that seasonal forecasting benefits not only consumers but also producers if the latter adopt a strategic crop mix. This mix differs from historical crop mixes by having higher shares of crops which fare relatively well under climate change. The corresponding value of information is highly sensitive to farmers' crop mix choices.
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Celaya, Michael A.; Wahr, John M.; Bryan, Frank O.
1999-06-01
The output of a coupled climate system model provides a synthetic climate record with temporal and spatial coverage not attainable with observational data, allowing evaluation of climatic excitation of polar motion on timescales of months to decades. Analysis of the geodetically inferred Chandler excitation power shows that it has fluctuated by up to 90% since 1900 and that it has characteristics representative of a stationary Gaussian process. Our model-predicted climate excitation of the Chandler wobble also exhibits variable power comparable to the observed. Ocean currents and bottom pressure shifts acting together can alone drive the 14-month wobble. The same is true of the excitation generated by the combined effects of barometric pressure and winds. The oceanic and atmospheric contributions are this large because of a relatively high degree of constructive interference between seafloor pressure and currents and between atmospheric pressure and winds. In contrast, excitation by the redistribution of water on land appears largely insignificant. Not surprisingly, the full climate effect is even more capable of driving the wobble than the effects of the oceans or atmosphere alone are. Our match to the observed annual excitation is also improved, by about 17%, over previous estimates made with historical climate data. Efforts to explain the 30-year Markowitz wobble meet with less success. Even so, at periods ranging from months to decades, excitation generated by a model of a coupled climate system makes a close approximation to the amplitude of what is geodetically observed.
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Köppen climate types in observed and simulated climates
Czech Academy of Sciences Publication Activity Database
Kalvová, J.; Halenka, T.; Bezpalcová, K.; Nemešová, Ivana
2003-01-01
Roč. 47, - (2003), s. 185-202 ISSN 0039-3169 R&D Projects: GA ČR GA205/99/1561; GA AV ČR IAA3042903; GA MŽP SJ/740/1/00 Institutional research plan: CEZ:AV0Z3042911 Keywords : Köppen climate classification * general circulation models * ECHAM4 * HadCM2 * climate projections Subject RIV: DG - Athmosphere Sciences, Meteorology Impact factor: 0.426, year: 2003
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International Nuclear Information System (INIS)
Petit, Michel; Barlier, F.; Bauer, P.; Besancenot, J.P.; Boe, J.; Bonneville, A.; Boucher, O.; Boy, D.; Cazenave, A.; Combarnous, M.; Dandonneau, Y.; Decampsk, H.; Drobrinski, P.; Ducrocq, V.; Durand, B.; Fouquart, Y.; Gautier, C.; Geistdoerfer, P.; Grandjean, A.; Guillou, M.; Labeyrie, L.; Laval, K.; Le Cozannet, G.; Lefebvre, M.; Le Treut, H.; Masson-Delmotte, V.; Merle, J.; Ngo, C.; Pailleux, J.; Painter, J.; Pouyaud, B.; Salas y Melia, D.; Terray, L.; Vautard, R.; Voituriez, B.; Zaharia, R.; Tubiana, Laurence; Orsenna, Erik
2015-01-01
The objective of this collective book is to provide the public with elements of information showing that there is an actual risk that climate-related risk severely affects mankind during the next decades. A first part proposes a summary of the most recent works which place the problematic of climate change within its scientific context at different time and space scales. The second part describes the nature and properties of various greenhouse gases. The third part addresses the future evolution of some regional climates which are relevant for impact studies (possible evolutions during this century and beyond, associated uncertainties). The fourth part proposes a rather detailed presentation of possible consequences of local climate changes. The authors assess possible ecological consequences, analyse human and social risks and measures which could make these climate changes more bearable. The fifth part identifies actions to be performed to reduce carbon dioxide emissions in the atmosphere, and the possibility to correct modifications we have imposed to the planet climate. The last part analyses the evolution of world awareness of the climate issue
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Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)
Fenge, T.
2001-12-31
Marked climate change has been forecast for regions in high latitudes by global climate models presented by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Observations and reports of significant alterations to the natural environment of Canada's north have been reported by Inuit and other indigenous peoples using their traditional ecological knowledge as a reference. Global climate change appears to be the cause for the changes noted. Many aspects of climate change need to be addressed, such as research, outreach, impacts, adaptations and international negotiations. Based on the strong partnership that had been developed between the Inuit and four federal agencies, three territorial governments and four indigenous people's organizations in support of the Northern Contaminants Program, Inuit are now seeking a partnership with the federal government to address the issues mentioned above concerning climate change. refs., 1 tab.
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The neurobiology of climate change.
O'Donnell, Sean
2018-01-06
Directional climate change (global warming) is causing rapid alterations in animals' environments. Because the nervous system is at the forefront of animals' interactions with the environment, the neurobiological implications of climate change are central to understanding how individuals, and ultimately populations, will respond to global warming. Evidence is accumulating for individual level, mechanistic effects of climate change on nervous system development and performance. Climate change can also alter sensory stimuli, changing the effectiveness of sensory and cognitive systems for achieving biological fitness. At the population level, natural selection forces stemming from directional climate change may drive rapid evolutionary change in nervous system structure and function.
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Climate change and marine life
DEFF Research Database (Denmark)
Richardson, Anthony J.; Brown, Christopher J.; Brander, Keith
2012-01-01
A Marine Climate Impacts Workshop was held from 29 April to 3 May 2012 at the US National Center of Ecological Analysis and Synthesis in Santa Barbara. This workshop was the culmination of a series of six meetings over the past three years, which had brought together 25 experts in climate change...... ecology, analysis of large datasets, palaeontology, marine ecology and physical oceanography. Aims of these workshops were to produce a global synthesis of climate impacts on marine biota, to identify sensitive habitats and taxa, to inform the current Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC......) process, and to strengthen research into ecological impacts of climate change...
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The neurobiology of climate change
O'Donnell, Sean
2018-02-01
Directional climate change (global warming) is causing rapid alterations in animals' environments. Because the nervous system is at the forefront of animals' interactions with the environment, the neurobiological implications of climate change are central to understanding how individuals, and ultimately populations, will respond to global warming. Evidence is accumulating for individual level, mechanistic effects of climate change on nervous system development and performance. Climate change can also alter sensory stimuli, changing the effectiveness of sensory and cognitive systems for achieving biological fitness. At the population level, natural selection forces stemming from directional climate change may drive rapid evolutionary change in nervous system structure and function.
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Climate change research in Bulgaria
International Nuclear Information System (INIS)
Iotova, A.; Koleva, E.
1995-01-01
Climate is traditionally one of the main fields of research interest and objects for study in Bulgaria. Therefore, many investigations on its genesis and specific features are carried out in the past and present. Recently, climate change research appears to be the most actual topic and it is in the centre of climatic studies. A major part of these studies are realized at the National Institute of Meteorology and Hydrology (NIMH) because of its essential role in collection and analysis of the basic climatic data for the country. A brief description of the climate change research at NIMH is presented and the obtained results are summarized
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Climate Prediction Center - Monitoring & Data Index
Weather Service NWS logo - Click to go to the NWS home page Climate Prediction Center Site Map News Oceanic & Atmospheric Monitoring and Data Monitoring Weather & Climate in Realtime Climate Diagnostics Bulletin Preliminary Climate Diagnostics Bulletin Figures Monthly Atmospheric & Sea Surface
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International Nuclear Information System (INIS)
2004-01-01
The Climate Plan is an action plan drawn up by the French Government to respond to the climate change challenge, first by 2010 (complying with the Kyoto Protocol target), and, secondly, beyond this date. Projections for France show that national emissions could be 10% higher than the Kyoto target in 2010 if no measures are taken. This is particularly due to increasing emissions in the sectors affecting daily life (residential-tertiary sectors, transport, etc.). For this reason, the Climate Plan contains measures affecting all sectors of the economy and the daily life of all French citizens with a view to economizing the equivalent of 54 million tonnes of CO 2 each year by the year 2010, which will help to reverse the trend significantly. Beyond 2010, the Climate Plan sets out a strategy for technological research which will enable France to meet a target of reducing greenhouse gas emissions four or fivefold by 2050. (author)
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International Nuclear Information System (INIS)
Hauet, J.P.
2008-01-01
Electricity underpins economic development and contributes to the welfare of human beings. But its responsibility in current emissions of greenhouse gases is evident and is likely to go on increasing with the return of coal and the putting into service of an impressive number of new power plants, especially in China. Is electricity for the climate a threat or sheet anchor? The article calls for a thermodynamic approach of the climate problems and how, thanks to a comprehensive optimization of the electrical system, it is possible to imagine scenarios that are compatible with the climate constraints. It warns against excessive optimism on some solutions (notably carbon capture) and recalls that nuclear energy remains, with energy efficiency, the only industrially proven large scale solution to reduce emissions. Finally, the article stresses that the fight against global warming is a matter of incremental costs. It questions the capacity of market mechanisms to adequately address the climate issue which is a long-term one relating to general interest. (author)
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Evolution of plasticity and adaptive responses to climate change along climate gradients.
Kingsolver, Joel G; Buckley, Lauren B
2017-08-16
The relative contributions of phenotypic plasticity and adaptive evolution to the responses of species to recent and future climate change are poorly understood. We combine recent (1960-2010) climate and phenotypic data with microclimate, heat balance, demographic and evolutionary models to address this issue for a montane butterfly, Colias eriphyle , along an elevational gradient. Our focal phenotype, wing solar absorptivity, responds plastically to developmental (pupal) temperatures and plays a central role in thermoregulatory adaptation in adults. Here, we show that both the phenotypic and adaptive consequences of plasticity vary with elevation. Seasonal changes in weather generate seasonal variation in phenotypic selection on mean and plasticity of absorptivity, especially at lower elevations. In response to climate change in the past 60 years, our models predict evolutionary declines in mean absorptivity (but little change in plasticity) at high elevations, and evolutionary increases in plasticity (but little change in mean) at low elevation. The importance of plasticity depends on the magnitude of seasonal variation in climate relative to interannual variation. Our results suggest that selection and evolution of both trait means and plasticity can contribute to adaptive response to climate change in this system. They also illustrate how plasticity can facilitate rather than retard adaptive evolutionary responses to directional climate change in seasonal environments. © 2017 The Author(s).
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Embedding complex hydrology in the climate system - towards fully coupled climate-hydrology models
DEFF Research Database (Denmark)
Butts, M.; Rasmussen, S.H.; Ridler, M.
2013-01-01
Motivated by the need to develop better tools to understand the impact of future management and climate change on water resources, we present a set of studies with the overall aim of developing a fully dynamic coupling between a comprehensive hydrological model, MIKE SHE, and a regional climate...... distributed parameters using satellite remote sensing. Secondly, field data are used to investigate the effects of model resolution and parameter scales for use in a coupled model. Finally, the development of the fully coupled climate-hydrology model is described and some of the challenges associated...... with coupling models for hydrological processes on sub-grid scales of the regional climate model are presented....
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Ray, A. J.; Ojima, D. S.; Morisette, J. T.
2012-12-01
The DOI North Central Climate Science Center (NC CSC) and the NOAA/NCAR National Climate Predictions and Projections (NCPP) Platform and have initiated a joint pilot study to collaboratively explore the "best available climate information" to support key land management questions and how to provide this information. NCPP's mission is to support state of the art approaches to develop and deliver comprehensive regional climate information and facilitate its use in decision making and adaptation planning. This presentation will describe the evolving joint pilot as a tangible, real-world demonstration of linkages between climate science, ecosystem science and resource management. Our joint pilot is developing a deliberate, ongoing interaction to prototype how NCPP will work with CSCs to develop and deliver needed climate information products, including translational information to support climate data understanding and use. This pilot also will build capacity in the North Central CSC by working with NCPP to use climate information used as input to ecological modeling. We will discuss lessons to date on developing and delivering needed climate information products based on this strategic partnership. Four projects have been funded to collaborate to incorporate climate information as part of an ecological modeling project, which in turn will address key DOI stakeholder priorities in the region: Riparian Corridors: Projecting climate change effects on cottonwood and willow seed dispersal phenology, flood timing, and seedling recruitment in western riparian forests. Sage Grouse & Habitats: Integrating climate and biological data into land management decision models to assess species and habitat vulnerability Grasslands & Forests: Projecting future effects of land management, natural disturbance, and CO2 on woody encroachment in the Northern Great Plains The value of climate information: Supporting management decisions in the Plains and Prairie Potholes LCC. NCCSC's role in
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Optimal learning on climate change: why climate skeptics should reduce emissions
van Wijnbergen, S.; Willems, T.
2015-01-01
Climate skeptics typically argue that the possibility that global warming is exogenous, implies that we should not take additional action towards reducing emissions until we know what drives warming. This paper however shows that even climate skeptics have an incentive to reduce emissions: such a
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Protecting climate with forests
International Nuclear Information System (INIS)
Jackson, Robert B; Randerson, James T; Anderson, Ray G; Pataki, Diane E; Canadell, Josep G; Avissar, Roni; Baldocchi, Dennis D; Bonan, Gordon B; Caldeira, Ken; Field, Christopher B; Diffenbaugh, Noah S; Hungate, Bruce A; Jobbagy, Esteban G; Nosetto, Marcelo D; Kueppers, Lara M
2008-01-01
Policies for climate mitigation on land rarely acknowledge biophysical factors, such as reflectivity, evaporation, and surface roughness. Yet such factors can alter temperatures much more than carbon sequestration does, and often in a conflicting way. We outline a framework for examining biophysical factors in mitigation policies and provide some best-practice recommendations based on that framework. Tropical projects-avoided deforestation, forest restoration, and afforestation-provide the greatest climate value, because carbon storage and biophysics align to cool the Earth. In contrast, the climate benefits of carbon storage are often counteracted in boreal and other snow-covered regions, where darker trees trap more heat than snow does. Managers can increase the climate benefit of some forest projects by using more reflective and deciduous species and through urban forestry projects that reduce energy use. Ignoring biophysical interactions could result in millions of dollars being invested in some mitigation projects that provide little climate benefit or, worse, are counter-productive.
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Protecting climate with forests
Jackson, Robert B.; Randerson, James T.; Canadell, Josep G.; Anderson, Ray G.; Avissar, Roni; Baldocchi, Dennis D.; Bonan, Gordon B.; Caldeira, Ken; Diffenbaugh, Noah S.; Field, Christopher B.; Hungate, Bruce A.; Jobbágy, Esteban G.; Kueppers, Lara M.; Nosetto, Marcelo D.; Pataki, Diane E.
2008-10-01
Policies for climate mitigation on land rarely acknowledge biophysical factors, such as reflectivity, evaporation, and surface roughness. Yet such factors can alter temperatures much more than carbon sequestration does, and often in a conflicting way. We outline a framework for examining biophysical factors in mitigation policies and provide some best-practice recommendations based on that framework. Tropical projects—avoided deforestation, forest restoration, and afforestation—provide the greatest climate value, because carbon storage and biophysics align to cool the Earth. In contrast, the climate benefits of carbon storage are often counteracted in boreal and other snow-covered regions, where darker trees trap more heat than snow does. Managers can increase the climate benefit of some forest projects by using more reflective and deciduous species and through urban forestry projects that reduce energy use. Ignoring biophysical interactions could result in millions of dollars being invested in some mitigation projects that provide little climate benefit or, worse, are counter-productive.
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Climate engineering and international law
Reynolds, Jesse; Farber, Daniel; Peeters, Marjan
2016-01-01
In the face of dire forecasts of climate change and disappointing emissions abatement, some scientists and others are increasingly suggesting and researching intentional, large-scale interventions in natural systems in order to counteract climate change. These ‘climate engineering’ or
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Politics of climate change belief
2017-01-01
Donald Trump's actions during the election and his first weeks as US president-elect send a strong message about his belief in climate change, or lack thereof. However, these actions may reflect polarization of climate change beliefs, not climate mitigation behaviour.
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Climate variability slows evolutionary responses of Colias butterflies to recent climate change.
Kingsolver, Joel G; Buckley, Lauren B
2015-03-07
How does recent climate warming and climate variability alter fitness, phenotypic selection and evolution in natural populations? We combine biophysical, demographic and evolutionary models with recent climate data to address this question for the subalpine and alpine butterfly, Colias meadii, in the southern Rocky Mountains. We focus on predicting patterns of selection and evolution for a key thermoregulatory trait, melanin (solar absorptivity) on the posterior ventral hindwings, which affects patterns of body temperature, flight activity, adult and egg survival, and reproductive success in Colias. Both mean annual summer temperatures and thermal variability within summers have increased during the past 60 years at subalpine and alpine sites. At the subalpine site, predicted directional selection on wing absorptivity has shifted from generally positive (favouring increased wing melanin) to generally negative during the past 60 years, but there is substantial variation among years in the predicted magnitude and direction of selection and the optimal absorptivity. The predicted magnitude of directional selection at the alpine site declined during the past 60 years and varies substantially among years, but selection has generally been positive at this site. Predicted evolutionary responses to mean climate warming at the subalpine site since 1980 is small, because of the variability in selection and asymmetry of the fitness function. At both sites, the predicted effects of adaptive evolution on mean population fitness are much smaller than the fluctuations in mean fitness due to climate variability among years. Our analyses suggest that variation in climate within and among years may strongly limit evolutionary responses of ectotherms to mean climate warming in these habitats. © 2015 The Author(s) Published by the Royal Society. All rights reserved.
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National Center on Safe Supportive Learning Environments, 2017
2017-01-01
Improving school climate takes time and commitment from a variety of people in a variety of roles. This document outlines how family members--including guardians of students--can support school climate improvements. Key action steps are provided for the following strategies: (1) Participate in planning for school climate improvements; (2) Engage…
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International Nuclear Information System (INIS)
1991-10-01
Global climate change is a serious environmental concern, and the US has developed ''An Action Agenda'' to deal with it. At the heart of the US effort is the US Global Change Research Program (USGCRP), which has been developed by the Committee on Earth and Environmental Sciences (CEES) of the Federal Coordinating Council for Sciences, Engineering, and Technology (FCCSET). The USGCRP will provide the scientific basis for sound policy making on the climate-change issue. The DOE contribution to the USGCRP is the Carbon Dioxide Research Program, which now places particular emphasis on the rapid improvement of the capability to predict global and regional climate change. DOE's Carbon Dioxide Research Program has been addressing the carbon dioxide-climate change connection for more than twelve years and has provided a solid scientific foundation for the USGCRP. The expansion of the DOE effort reflects the increased attention that the Department has placed on the issue and is reflected in the National Energy Strategy (NES) that was released in 1991. This Program Summary describes projects funded by the Carbon Dioxide Research Program during FY 1991 and gives a brief overview of objectives, organization, and accomplishments. The Environmental Sciences Division of the Office of Health and Environmental Research, Office of Energy Research supports a Carbon Dioxide Research Program to determine the scientific linkage between the rise of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, especially carbon dioxide, and climate and vegetation change. One facet is the Core CO 2 Program, a pioneering program that DOE established more than 10 years ago to understand and predict the ways that fossil-fuel burning could affect atmospheric CO 2 concentration, global climate, and the Earth's biosphere. Major research areas are: global carbon cycle; climate detection and models of climate change; vegetation research; resource analysis; and, information and integration
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Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)
Lucas B. Fortini
2017-07-01
Full Text Available For many species the threats of climate change occur in a context of multiple existing threats. Given the current focus of global change ecology in identifying and understanding species vulnerable to climate change, we performed a global analysis to characterize the multi-threat context for species threatened by climate change. Utilizing 30,053 species from the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s (IUCN Red List of Threatened Species, we sought to evaluate if species threatened by climate change are more likely threatened by a greater number of non-climatic threats than species not threatened by climate change. Our results show that species threatened by climate change are generally impacted by 21% more non-climatic threats than species not threatened by climate change. Across all species, this pattern is related to IUCN risk status, where endangered species threatened by climate change face 33% more non-climatic threats than endangered species not threatened by climate change. With the clear challenges of assessing current and projected impacts of climate change on species and ecosystems, research often requires reductionist approaches that result in downplaying this multi-threat context. This cautionary note bears relevance beyond climate change threatened species as we also found other (but not all anthropogenic threats are also similarly associated with more threats. Our findings serve as a reminder that ecological research should seriously consider these potential threat interactions, especially for species under elevated conservation concern.
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Climate | National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
Jump to Content Enter Search Terms Weather Climate Oceans & Coasts Fisheries Satellites your local weather Enter your ZIP code GO Enter Search Terms Content OUR WORK Climate From to help people understand and prepare for climate variability and change. Climate. NOAA From
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Global soil-climate-biome diagram: linking soil properties to climate and biota
Zhao, X.; Yang, Y.; Fang, J.
2017-12-01
As a critical component of the Earth system, soils interact strongly with both climate and biota and provide fundamental ecosystem services that maintain food, climate, and human security. Despite significant progress in digital soil mapping techniques and the rapidly growing quantity of observed soil information, quantitative linkages between soil properties, climate and biota at the global scale remain unclear. By compiling a large global soil database, we mapped seven major soil properties (bulk density [BD]; sand, silt and clay fractions; soil pH; soil organic carbon [SOC] density [SOCD]; and soil total nitrogen [STN] density [STND]) based on machine learning algorithms (regional random forest [RF] model) and quantitatively assessed the linkage between soil properties, climate and biota at the global scale. Our results demonstrated a global soil-climate-biome diagram, which improves our understanding of the strong correspondence between soils, climate and biomes. Soil pH decreased with greater mean annual precipitation (MAP) and lower mean annual temperature (MAT), and the critical MAP for the transition from alkaline to acidic soil pH decreased with decreasing MAT. Specifically, the critical MAP ranged from 400-500 mm when the MAT exceeded 10 °C but could decrease to 50-100 mm when the MAT was approximately 0 °C. SOCD and STND were tightly linked; both increased in accordance with lower MAT and higher MAP across terrestrial biomes. Global stocks of SOC and STN were estimated to be 788 ± 39.4 Pg (1015 g, or billion tons) and 63 ± 3.3 Pg in the upper 30-cm soil layer, respectively, but these values increased to 1654 ± 94.5 Pg and 133 ± 7.8 Pg in the upper 100-cm soil layer, respectively. These results reveal quantitative linkages between soil properties, climate and biota at the global scale, suggesting co-evolution of the soil, climate and biota under conditions of global environmental change.
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Forestry Canada's perspectives on climate change
International Nuclear Information System (INIS)
Hall, J.P.; Carlson, L.W.
1990-01-01
The impacts of climatic change on Canada's forestry sector are discussed, in the context of major research priorities relating to forecasting climate, forecasting forest responses, monitoring changes, mitigating effects, and understanding the forest carbon balance. There are five major concerns that affect policy decisions: effects of climatic change on forests; adaptation to climate change; impacts of changing crops on forestry; changing forestry values in changing sociological settings; and international implications of the changing climate. A scientific program to respond to climate change issues is required, and should include the following concentrations of research effort. Planning requires projections of likely future climates, and efforts should concern relations between pre-historic climates and forest ecosystems and integrating data into predictive models. Forecasting of response of forests should include tree physiology, factors controlling reforestation, variations in forest trees, effects of pollutants, damage to forests, and forest decline
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DEFF Research Database (Denmark)
Grant, Stephen; Tamason, Charlotte Crim; Jensen, Peter Kjær Mackie
2015-01-01
wasconducted in Bangladesh. The study found recent examples of climatization related to Cyclone Aila (2009) and saltwater intrusion in Bangladesh. In most cases these disasters were climatized in order tocreate a sense of urgency in order to push for an increase in financial aid to Bangladeshand to deflect...
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7th International Seminar on Climate System and Climate Change(ISCS) through the Eyes of a Trainee
Institute of Scientific and Technical Information of China (English)
Karen K.Y.Shum
2010-01-01
@@ At the invitation of Dr.Dahe Qin,the president of ISCS and the Co-Chair of IPCC WGI,the Hong Kong Observatory has been obliged to participate and benefit from the International Seminar in Beijing,China on 19-30 July 2010.Seminar topics included atmospheric chemistry and climate effects of aerosol biogeochemical cycles,cryosphere and its role in the climate system and climate change,climate models and its application in climate change research,climate change adaptation and mitigation.Data is a common ground for these multi-disciplinary studies around the globe.
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ClimateNet: A Machine Learning dataset for Climate Science Research
Prabhat, M.; Biard, J.; Ganguly, S.; Ames, S.; Kashinath, K.; Kim, S. K.; Kahou, S.; Maharaj, T.; Beckham, C.; O'Brien, T. A.; Wehner, M. F.; Williams, D. N.; Kunkel, K.; Collins, W. D.
2017-12-01
Deep Learning techniques have revolutionized commercial applications in Computer vision, speech recognition and control systems. The key for all of these developments was the creation of a curated, labeled dataset ImageNet, for enabling multiple research groups around the world to develop methods, benchmark performance and compete with each other. The success of Deep Learning can be largely attributed to the broad availability of this dataset. Our empirical investigations have revealed that Deep Learning is similarly poised to benefit the task of pattern detection in climate science. Unfortunately, labeled datasets, a key pre-requisite for training, are hard to find. Individual research groups are typically interested in specialized weather patterns, making it hard to unify, and share datasets across groups and institutions. In this work, we are proposing ClimateNet: a labeled dataset that provides labeled instances of extreme weather patterns, as well as associated raw fields in model and observational output. We develop a schema in NetCDF to enumerate weather pattern classes/types, store bounding boxes, and pixel-masks. We are also working on a TensorFlow implementation to natively import such NetCDF datasets, and are providing a reference convolutional architecture for binary classification tasks. Our hope is that researchers in Climate Science, as well as ML/DL, will be able to use (and extend) ClimateNet to make rapid progress in the application of Deep Learning for Climate Science research.
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Alexander, Jake M
2013-09-22
A topic of great current interest is the capacity of populations to adapt genetically to rapidly changing climates, for example by evolving the timing of life-history events, but this is challenging to address experimentally. I use a plant invasion as a model system to tackle this question by combining molecular markers, a common garden experiment and climatic niche modelling. This approach reveals that non-native Lactuca serriola originates primarily from Europe, a climatic subset of its native range, with low rates of admixture from Asia. It has rapidly refilled its climatic niche in the new range, associated with the evolution of flowering phenology to produce clines along climate gradients that mirror those across the native range. Consequently, some non-native plants have evolved development times and grow under climates more extreme than those found in Europe, but not among populations from the native range as a whole. This suggests that many plant populations can adapt rapidly to changed climatic conditions that are already within the climatic niche space occupied by the species elsewhere in its range, but that evolution to conditions outside of this range is more difficult. These findings can also help to explain the prevalence of niche conservatism among non-native species.
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Climate variability and change
International Nuclear Information System (INIS)
Manton, M.
2006-01-01
When Australia's climate should not be definite barrier to the population reaching 30 million by 2050, it is recognised that our climate has limited the development of the nation over the past 200 years. Indeed in 1911, based on a comparison of the climate and development between the US and Australia. Griffith Taylor predicted that Australia's population would be 19 million at the end of the 20th century, which is a pretty good 90-year forecast. The climate constraint is not only due to much of the country being semi-arid with an annual rainfall below 400 millimetres, but also due to the large year-to-year variability of rainfall across the country
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CITYZEN climate impact studies
Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)
Schutz, Martin (ed.)
2011-07-01
We have estimated the impact of climate change on the chemical composition of the troposphere due to changes in climate from current climate (2000-2010) looking 40 years ahead (2040-2050). The climate projection has been made by the ECHAM5 model and was followed by chemistry-transport modelling using a global model, Oslo CTM2 (Isaksen et al., 2005; Srvde et al., 2008), and a regional model, EMEP. In this report we focus on carbon monoxide (CO) and surface ozone (O3) which are measures of primary and secondary air pollution. In parallel we have estimated the change in the same air pollutants resulting from changes in emissions over the same time period. (orig.)
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Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)
N. Mahowald
2011-02-01
Full Text Available Coupled-carbon-climate simulations are an essential tool for predicting the impact of human activity onto the climate and biogeochemistry. Here we incorporate prognostic desert dust and anthropogenic aerosols into the CCSM3.1 coupled carbon-climate model and explore the resulting interactions with climate and biogeochemical dynamics through a series of transient anthropogenic simulations (20th and 21st centuries and sensitivity studies. The inclusion of prognostic aerosols into this model has a small net global cooling effect on climate but does not significantly impact the globally averaged carbon cycle; we argue that this is likely to be because the CCSM3.1 model has a small climate feedback onto the carbon cycle. We propose a mechanism for including desert dust and anthropogenic aerosols into a simple carbon-climate feedback analysis to explain the results of our and previous studies. Inclusion of aerosols has statistically significant impacts on regional climate and biogeochemistry, in particular through the effects on the ocean nitrogen cycle and primary productivity of altered iron inputs from desert dust deposition.
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Modeling and assessing international climate financing
Wu, Jing; Tang, Lichun; Mohamed, Rayman; Zhu, Qianting; Wang, Zheng
2016-06-01
Climate financing is a key issue in current negotiations on climate protection. This study establishes a climate financing model based on a mechanism in which donor countries set up funds for climate financing and recipient countries use the funds exclusively for carbon emission reduction. The burden-sharing principles are based on GDP, historical emissions, and consumptionbased emissions. Using this model, we develop and analyze a series of scenario simulations, including a financing program negotiated at the Cancun Climate Change Conference (2010) and several subsequent programs. Results show that sustained climate financing can help to combat global climate change. However, the Cancun Agreements are projected to result in a reduction of only 0.01°C in global warming by 2100 compared to the scenario without climate financing. Longer-term climate financing programs should be established to achieve more significant benefits. Our model and simulations also show that climate financing has economic benefits for developing countries. Developed countries will suffer a slight GDP loss in the early stages of climate financing, but the longterm economic growth and the eventual benefits of climate mitigation will compensate for this slight loss. Different burden-sharing principles have very similar effects on global temperature change and economic growth of recipient countries, but they do result in differences in GDP changes for Japan and the FSU. The GDP-based principle results in a larger share of financial burden for Japan, while the historical emissions-based principle results in a larger share of financial burden for the FSU. A larger burden share leads to a greater GDP loss.
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Climate change impacts on US agriculture and forestry: benefits of global climate stabilization
Beach, Robert H.; Cai, Yongxia; Thomson, Allison; Zhang, Xuesong; Jones, Russell; McCarl, Bruce A.; Crimmins, Allison; Martinich, Jeremy; Cole, Jefferson; Ohrel, Sara; DeAngelo, Benjamin; McFarland, James; Strzepek, Kenneth; Boehlert, Brent
2015-09-01
Increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, higher temperatures, altered precipitation patterns, and other climate change impacts have already begun to affect US agriculture and forestry, with impacts expected to become more substantial in the future. There have been numerous studies of climate change impacts on agriculture or forestry, but relatively little research examining the long-term net impacts of a stabilization scenario relative to a case with unabated climate change. We provide an analysis of the potential benefits of global climate change mitigation for US agriculture and forestry through 2100, accounting for landowner decisions regarding land use, crop mix, and management practices. The analytic approach involves a combination of climate models, a crop process model (EPIC), a dynamic vegetation model used for forests (MC1), and an economic model of the US forestry and agricultural sector (FASOM-GHG). We find substantial impacts on productivity, commodity markets, and consumer and producer welfare for the stabilization scenario relative to unabated climate change, though the magnitude and direction of impacts vary across regions and commodities. Although there is variability in welfare impacts across climate simulations, we find positive net benefits from stabilization in all cases, with cumulative impacts ranging from 32.7 billion to 54.5 billion over the period 2015-2100. Our estimates contribute to the literature on potential benefits of GHG mitigation and can help inform policy decisions weighing alternative mitigation and adaptation actions.
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Climate change impacts on US agriculture and forestry: benefits of global climate stabilization
Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)
Beach, Robert H.; Cai, Yongxia; Thomson, Allison; Zhang, Xuesong; Jones, Russell; McCarl, Bruce A.; Crimmins, Allison; Martinich, Jeremy; Cole, Jefferson; Ohrel, Sara; DeAngelo, Benjamin; McFarland, James; Strzepek, Kenneth; Boehlert, Brent
2015-09-01
Increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, higher temperatures, altered precipitation patterns, and other climate change impacts have already begun to affect US agriculture and forestry, with impacts expected to become more substantial in the future. There have been numerous studies of climate change impacts on agriculture or forestry, but relatively little research examining the long-term net impacts of a stabilization scenario relative to a case with unabated climate change. We provide an analysis of the potential benefits of global climate change mitigation for US agriculture and forestry through 2100, accounting for landowner decisions regarding land use, crop mix, and management practices. The analytic approach involves a combination of climate models, a crop process model (EPIC), a dynamic vegetation model used for forests (MC1), and an economic model of the US forestry and agricultural sector (FASOM-GHG). We find substantial impacts on productivity, commodity markets, and consumer and producer welfare for the stabilization scenario relative to unabated climate change, though the magnitude and direction of impacts vary across regions and commodities. Although there is variability in welfare impacts across climate simulations, we find positive net benefits from stabilization in all cases, with cumulative impacts ranging from $32.7 billion to $54.5 billion over the period 2015-2100. Our estimates contribute to the literature on potential benefits of GHG mitigation and can help inform policy decisions weighing alternative mitigation and adaptation actions.
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The Co-evolution of Climate Models and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
Somerville, R. C.
2010-12-01
As recently as the 1950s, global climate models, or GCMs, did not exist, and the notion that man-made carbon dioxide might lead to significant climate change was not regarded as a serious possibility by most experts. Today, of course, the prospect or threat of exactly this type of climate change dominates the science and ranks among the most pressing issues confronting all mankind. Indeed, the prevailing scientific view throughout the first half of the twentieth century was that adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere would have only a negligible effect on climate. The science of climate change caused by atmospheric carbon dioxide changes has thus undergone a genuine revolution. An extraordinarily rapid development of global climate models has also characterized this period, especially in the three decades since about 1980. In these three decades, the number of GCMs has greatly increased, and their physical and computational aspects have both markedly improved. Modeling progress has been enabled by many scientific advances, of course, but especially by a massive increase in available computer power, with supercomputer speeds increasing by roughly a factor of a million in the three decades from about 1980 to 2010. This technological advance has permitted a rapid increase in the physical comprehensiveness of GCMs as well as in spatial computational resolution. In short, GCMs have dramatically evolved over time, in exactly the same recent period as popular interest and scientific concern about anthropogenic climate change have markedly increased. In parallel, a unique international organization, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, has also recently come into being and also evolved rapidly. Today, the IPCC has become widely respected and globally influential. The IPCC was founded in 1988, and its history is thus even shorter than that of GCMs. Yet, its stature today is such that a series of IPCC reports assessing climate change science has already
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Shafer, M.; Boone, M.; Keim, B. D.
2015-12-01
With the rapidly-increasing number of climate services providers, the landscape for putting climate into practice is getting both easier to access and more confusing. Each provider serves a different clientele, and in so doing draws more stakeholder organizations into the sphere of those using climate information in decision-making. The challenge has been in connecting these new stakeholders with expertise that may reside within a different provider organization. To help close the gap, the Southern Climate Impacts Planning Program (SCIPP; http://www.southernclimate.org), a NOAA RISA Team, initiated a summer internship program, where students with expertise in meteorology or climatology would work for an organization more closely aligned with another climate services provider network. The format was patterned after the successful NSF-funded Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) program at the National Weather Center, where students are selected from undergraduate programs across the nation to spend a summer conducting research under a scientific mentor. The SCIPP initiative flipped this model, instead sending students to organizations with operational needs for climate information to work under their mentorship in partnership with SCIPP scientists. Over the past two summers, SCIPP has recruited students to work at landscape-based (Gulf Coast Joint Venture and National Wetlands Research Center) and community-based (Tulsa Partners) organizations. Students worked alongside the organizations' staff on a daily basis and were supported through periodic calls with the SCIPP team to help identify appropriate datasets and work through methodological issues. This presentation will discuss how these relationships were created, the expertise of each of the organizations involved, and outcomes from the projects.
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Griscom, Bronson W.; Adams, Justin; Ellis, Peter W.; Houghton, Richard A.; Lomax, Guy; Miteva, Daniela A.; Schlesinger, William H.; Shoch, David; Siikamäki, Juha V.; Smith, Pete; Woodbury, Peter; Zganjar, Chris; Blackman, Allen; Campari, João; Conant, Richard T.; Delgado, Christopher; Elias, Patricia; Gopalakrishna, Trisha; Hamsik, Marisa R.; Herrero, Mario; Kiesecker, Joseph; Landis, Emily; Laestadius, Lars; Leavitt, Sara M.; Minnemeyer, Susan; Polasky, Stephen; Potapov, Peter; Putz, Francis E.; Sanderman, Jonathan; Silvius, Marcel; Wollenberg, Eva; Fargione, Joseph
2017-10-01
Better stewardship of land is needed to achieve the Paris Climate Agreement goal of holding warming to below 2 °C; however, confusion persists about the specific set of land stewardship options available and their mitigation potential. To address this, we identify and quantify “natural climate solutions” (NCS): 20 conservation, restoration, and improved land management actions that increase carbon storage and/or avoid greenhouse gas emissions across global forests, wetlands, grasslands, and agricultural lands. We find that the maximum potential of NCS—when constrained by food security, fiber security, and biodiversity conservation—is 23.8 petagrams of CO2 equivalent (PgCO2e) y‑1 (95% CI 20.3–37.4). This is ≥30% higher than prior estimates, which did not include the full range of options and safeguards considered here. About half of this maximum (11.3 PgCO2e y‑1) represents cost-effective climate mitigation, assuming the social cost of CO2 pollution is ≥100 USD MgCO2e‑1 by 2030. Natural climate solutions can provide 37% of cost-effective CO2 mitigation needed through 2030 for a >66% chance of holding warming to below 2 °C. One-third of this cost-effective NCS mitigation can be delivered at or below 10 USD MgCO2‑1. Most NCS actions—if effectively implemented—also offer water filtration, flood buffering, soil health, biodiversity habitat, and enhanced climate resilience. Work remains to better constrain uncertainty of NCS mitigation estimates. Nevertheless, existing knowledge reported here provides a robust basis for immediate global action to improve ecosystem stewardship as a major solution to climate change.
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Climate Prediction Center - monthly Outlook
Weather Service NWS logo - Click to go to the NWS home page Climate Prediction Center Site Map News Outlooks monthly Climate Outlooks Banner OFFICIAL Forecasts June 2018 [UPDATED MONTHLY FORECASTS SERVICE ) Canonical Correlation Analysis ECCA - Ensemble Canonical Correlation Analysis Optimal Climate Normals
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Assessment of climate change scenarios for Saudi Arabia using data from global climate models
International Nuclear Information System (INIS)
Husain, T.; Chowdhury, S.
2009-01-01
This study assesses available scientific information and data to predict changes in the climatic parameters in Saudi Arabia for understanding the impacts for mitigation and/or adaptation. Meteorological data from 26 synoptic stations were analyzed in this study. Various climatic change scenarios were reviewed and A 2 and B 2 climatic scenario families were selected. In order to assess long-term global impact, global climatic models were used to simulate changes in temperature, precipitation, relative humidity, solar radiation, and wind circulation. Using global climate model (GCM), monthly time series data was retrieved for Longitude 15 o N to 35 o N and 32.5 o E to 60 o E covering the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia from 1970 to 2100 for all grids. Taking averages of 1970 to 2003 as baseline, change in temperature, relative humidity and precipitation were estimated for the base period. A comparative evaluation was performed for predictive capabilities of these models for temperature, precipitation and relative humidity. Available meteorological data from 1970 to 2003 was used to determine trends. This paper discusses the inconsistency in these parameters for decision-making and recommends future studies by linking global climate models with a suitable regional climate modeling tool. (author)
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National Center on Safe Supportive Learning Environments, 2017
2017-01-01
Improving school climate takes time and commitment from a variety of people in a variety of roles. This document outlines key action steps to engage students in the school climate improvement process. Key action steps are provided for the following strategies: (1) Participate in planning for school climate improvements; (2) Engage stakeholders in…
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Climate change issues in China
Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)
Ye Ruqiu (China National Environmental Protection Agency, Beijing (China))
China is vulnerable to global climate change because of its specific geographical and climatic conditions. Recent climate change trends in China are briefly described. To deal with climate change and reduce the increase in greenhouse gas emissions, a set of strategic measures aimed at harmonizing environmental protection and economic development have been worked out. Special attention has been given to the analysis of problems of energy efficiency and energy structure. Preliminary policy consideration is discussed. 8 refs., 3 tabs.
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Optimal learning on climate change: why climate skeptics should reduce emissions
van Wijnbergen, S.; Willems, T.
2012-01-01
Climate skeptics argue that the possibility that global warming is exogenous implies that we should not take additional action towards reducing greenhouse gas emissions until we know more. However this paper shows that even climate skeptics have an incentive to reduce emissions: such a change of
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Social and economic impacts of climate.
Carleton, Tamma A; Hsiang, Solomon M
2016-09-09
For centuries, thinkers have considered whether and how climatic conditions-such as temperature, rainfall, and violent storms-influence the nature of societies and the performance of economies. A multidisciplinary renaissance of quantitative empirical research is illuminating important linkages in the coupled climate-human system. We highlight key methodological innovations and results describing effects of climate on health, economics, conflict, migration, and demographics. Because of persistent "adaptation gaps," current climate conditions continue to play a substantial role in shaping modern society, and future climate changes will likely have additional impact. For example, we compute that temperature depresses current U.S. maize yields by ~48%, warming since 1980 elevated conflict risk in Africa by ~11%, and future warming may slow global economic growth rates by ~0.28 percentage points per year. In general, we estimate that the economic and social burden of current climates tends to be comparable in magnitude to the additional projected impact caused by future anthropogenic climate changes. Overall, findings from this literature point to climate as an important influence on the historical evolution of the global economy, they should inform how we respond to modern climatic conditions, and they can guide how we predict the consequences of future climate changes. Copyright © 2016, American Association for the Advancement of Science.
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Eucalypts face increasing climate stress.
Butt, Nathalie; Pollock, Laura J; McAlpine, Clive A
2013-12-01
Global climate change is already impacting species and ecosystems across the planet. Trees, although long-lived, are sensitive to changes in climate, including climate extremes. Shifts in tree species' distributions will influence biodiversity and ecosystem function at scales ranging from local to landscape; dry and hot regions will be especially vulnerable. The Australian continent has been especially susceptible to climate change with extreme heat waves, droughts, and flooding in recent years, and this climate trajectory is expected to continue. We sought to understand how climate change may impact Australian ecosystems by modeling distributional changes in eucalypt species, which dominate or codominate most forested ecosystems across Australia. We modeled a representative sample of Eucalyptus and Corymbia species (n = 108, or 14% of all species) using newly available Representative Concentration Pathway (RCP) scenarios developed for the 5th Assessment Report of the IPCC, and bioclimatic and substrate predictor variables. We compared current, 2025, 2055, and 2085 distributions. Overall, Eucalyptus and Corymbia species in the central desert and open woodland regions will be the most affected, losing 20% of their climate space under the mid-range climate scenario and twice that under the extreme scenario. The least affected species, in eastern Australia, are likely to lose 10% of their climate space under the mid-range climate scenario and twice that under the extreme scenario. Range shifts will be lateral as well as polewards, and these east-west transitions will be more significant, reflecting the strong influence of precipitation rather than temperature changes in subtropical and midlatitudes. These net losses, and the direction of shifts and contractions in range, suggest that many species in the eastern and southern seaboards will be pushed toward the continental limit and that large tracts of currently treed landscapes, especially in the continental interior
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Reddy, S. R.
2013-12-01
AMS Climate Studies is an introductory college-level course developed by the American Meteorological Society for implementation at undergraduate institutions nationwide and increasing involvement of under-represented groups The course places students in a dynamic and highly motivational educational environment where they investigate Earth's climate system using real-world environmental data. The AMS Climate Studies course package consists of a textbook, investigations manual, course website, and course management system-compatible files. Instructors can use these resources in combinations that make for an exciting learning experience for their students. The AMS Climate Studies Diversity Project Workshop participation is on a first-come, first-serve basis as determined by the date-of-receipt of the License Order Form. To grow AMS Diversity Programs to their fullest extent, institutions are encouraged to nominate course instructors who did not previously attend Diversity Project workshops. Until three months before the workshop, two-thirds of the workshop positions would be reserved for institutions new to AMS Diversity Projects. The AMS five day course implementation workshop was held in Washington, DC, during May 24-29, 2012. It covered essential course topics in climate science and global climate change, and strategies for course implementation. Talks would feature climate science and sustainability experts from Federal agencies and area research institutions, such as NASA, NOAA, University of Maryland, Howard University, George Mason University, and other Washington, DC, area institutions. The workshop would also include visits to NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and NOAA's Climate Prediction Center. JSU Meteorology Program will be offering AMS Climate Studies undergraduate course under MET 210: Climatology in spring 2014. AMS Climate Studies is offered as a 3 credit hour laboratory course with 2 lectures and 1 lab sessions per week. Although this course places
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NASA/JPL CLIMATE DAY: Middle and High School Students Get the Facts about Global Climate Change
Richardson, Annie; Callery, Susan; Srinivasan, Margaret
2013-04-01
In 2007, NASA Headquarters requested that Earth Science outreach teams brainstorm new education and public outreach activities that would focus on the topic of global climate change. At the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), Annie Richardson, outreach lead for the Ocean Surface Topography missions came up with the idea of a "Climate Day", capitalizing on the popular Earth Day name and events held annually throughout the world. JPL Climate Day would be an education and public outreach event whose objectives are to provide the latest scientific facts about global climate change - including the role the ocean plays in it, the contributions that NASA/JPL satellites and scientists make to the body of knowledge on the topic, and what we as individuals can do to promote global sustainability. The primary goal is that participants get this information in a fun and exciting environment, and walk away feeling empowered and capable of confidently engaging in the global climate debate. In March 2008, JPL and its partners held the first Climate Day event. 950 students from seven school districts heard from five scientists; visited exhibits, and participated in hands-on-activities. Pleased with the outcome, we organized JPL Climate Day 2010 at the Pasadena Convention Center in Pasadena, California, reaching more than 1700 students, teachers, and members of the general public over two days. Taking note of this successful model, NASA funded a multi-center, NASA Climate Day proposal in 2010 to expand Climate Day nation-wide. The NASA Climate Day proposal is a three-pronged project consisting of a cadre of Earth Ambassadors selected from among NASA-affiliated informal educators; a "Climate Day Kit" consisting of climate-related electronic resources available to the Earth Ambassadors; and NASA Climate Day events to be held in Earth Ambassador communities across the United States. NASA/JPL continues to host the original Climate Day event and in 2012 held its 4th event, at the Pasadena
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Climate Change Amplifications of Climate-Fire Teleconnections in the Southern Hemisphere
Mariani, Michela; Holz, Andrés.; Veblen, Thomas T.; Williamson, Grant; Fletcher, Michael-Shawn; Bowman, David M. J. S.
2018-05-01
Recent changes in trend and variability of the main Southern Hemisphere climate modes are driven by a variety of factors, including increasing atmospheric greenhouse gases, changes in tropical sea surface temperature, and stratospheric ozone depletion and recovery. One of the most important implications for climatic change is its effect via climate teleconnections on natural ecosystems, water security, and fire variability in proximity to populated areas, thus threatening human lives and properties. Only sparse and fragmentary knowledge of relationships between teleconnections, lightning strikes, and fire is available during the observed record within the Southern Hemisphere. This constitutes a major knowledge gap for undertaking suitable management and conservation plans. Our analysis of documentary fire records from Mediterranean and temperate regions across the Southern Hemisphere reveals a critical increased strength of climate-fire teleconnections during the onset of the 21st century including a tight coupling between lightning-ignited fire occurrences, the upward trend in the Southern Annular Mode, and rising temperatures across the Southern Hemisphere.
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Does climate directly influence NPP globally?
Chu, Chengjin; Bartlett, Megan; Wang, Youshi; He, Fangliang; Weiner, Jacob; Chave, Jérôme; Sack, Lawren
2016-01-01
The need for rigorous analyses of climate impacts has never been more crucial. Current textbooks state that climate directly influences ecosystem annual net primary productivity (NPP), emphasizing the urgent need to monitor the impacts of climate change. A recent paper challenged this consensus, arguing, based on an analysis of NPP for 1247 woody plant communities across global climate gradients, that temperature and precipitation have negligible direct effects on NPP and only perhaps have indirect effects by constraining total stand biomass (Mtot ) and stand age (a). The authors of that study concluded that the length of the growing season (lgs ) might have a minor influence on NPP, an effect they considered not to be directly related to climate. In this article, we describe flaws that affected that study's conclusions and present novel analyses to disentangle the effects of stand variables and climate in determining NPP. We re-analyzed the same database to partition the direct and indirect effects of climate on NPP, using three approaches: maximum-likelihood model selection, independent-effects analysis, and structural equation modeling. These new analyses showed that about half of the global variation in NPP could be explained by Mtot combined with climate variables and supported strong and direct influences of climate independently of Mtot , both for NPP and for net biomass change averaged across the known lifetime of the stands (ABC = average biomass change). We show that lgs is an important climate variable, intrinsically correlated with, and contributing to mean annual temperature and precipitation (Tann and Pann ), all important climatic drivers of NPP. Our analyses provide guidance for statistical and mechanistic analyses of climate drivers of ecosystem processes for predictive modeling and provide novel evidence supporting the strong, direct role of climate in determining vegetation productivity at the global scale. © 2015 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
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Climate policy: Bucket or drainer?
International Nuclear Information System (INIS)
Oikonomou, Vlasis; Patel, Martin; Worrell, Ernst
2006-01-01
Worldwide, industry is responsible for about 40% of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, making it an important target for climate policy. Energy-intensive industries may be particularly vulnerable to higher energy costs caused by climate policy. If companies cannot offset rising energy costs and would face increased competition from countries without climate policy, they may decide to relocate their industrial production to the countries without climate policy. The resulting net effect of climate policy on GHG emissions in foreign countries is typically referred to as 'carbon leakage'. Carbon leakage may lead to higher global GHG emissions due to the use of less advanced technology in less developed countries. Based on a literature review of climate policy, earlier environmental policy and analyses of historical trends, this paper assesses the carbon leakage effects of climate policy for energy-intensive industries. Reviews of past trends in production location of energy-intensive industries show an increased global production share of Non-Annex 1 countries. However, from empirical analyses we conclude that the trend is primarily driven by regional demand growth. In contrast, climate policy models show a strong carbon leakage. Even though future climate policy may have a more profound impact than environmental policies in the past, the modelling results are doubtful. Leakage generally seems to be overestimated in current models, especially as potential positive spillovers are often not included in the models. The ambiguity of the empirical analyses and the modelling results warrants further research in the importance of production factors for relocation
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Climate and dengue transmission: evidence and implications.
Morin, Cory W; Comrie, Andrew C; Ernst, Kacey
2013-01-01
Climate influences dengue ecology by affecting vector dynamics, agent development, and mosquito/human interactions. Although these relationships are known, the impact climate change will have on transmission is unclear. Climate-driven statistical and process-based models are being used to refine our knowledge of these relationships and predict the effects of projected climate change on dengue fever occurrence, but results have been inconsistent. We sought to identify major climatic influences on dengue virus ecology and to evaluate the ability of climate-based dengue models to describe associations between climate and dengue, simulate outbreaks, and project the impacts of climate change. We reviewed the evidence for direct and indirect relationships between climate and dengue generated from laboratory studies, field studies, and statistical analyses of associations between vectors, dengue fever incidence, and climate conditions. We assessed the potential contribution of climate-driven, process-based dengue models and provide suggestions to improve their performance. Relationships between climate variables and factors that influence dengue transmission are complex. A climate variable may increase dengue transmission potential through one aspect of the system while simultaneously decreasing transmission potential through another. This complexity may at least partly explain inconsistencies in statistical associations between dengue and climate. Process-based models can account for the complex dynamics but often omit important aspects of dengue ecology, notably virus development and host-species interactions. Synthesizing and applying current knowledge of climatic effects on all aspects of dengue virus ecology will help direct future research and enable better projections of climate change effects on dengue incidence.
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Ultrascale Visualization of Climate Data
Williams, Dean N.; Bremer, Timo; Doutriaux, Charles; Patchett, John; Williams, Sean; Shipman, Galen; Miller, Ross; Pugmire, David R.; Smith, Brian; Steed, Chad;
2013-01-01
Fueled by exponential increases in the computational and storage capabilities of high-performance computing platforms, climate simulations are evolving toward higher numerical fidelity, complexity, volume, and dimensionality. These technological breakthroughs are coming at a time of exponential growth in climate data, with estimates of hundreds of exabytes by 2020. To meet the challenges and exploit the opportunities that such explosive growth affords, a consortium of four national laboratories, two universities, a government agency, and two private companies formed to explore the next wave in climate science. Working in close collaboration with domain experts, the Ultrascale Visualization Climate Data Analysis Tools (UV-CDAT) project aims to provide high-level solutions to a variety of climate data analysis and visualization problems.
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Climate change and human health
DEFF Research Database (Denmark)
Warren, John A; Berner, James E; Curtis, Tine
2005-01-01
In northern regions, climate change can include changes in precipitation magnitude and frequency, reductions in sea ice extent and thickness, and climate warming and cooling. These changes can increase the frequency and severity of storms, flooding, or erosion; other changes may include drought...... or degradation of permafrost. Climate change can result in damage to sanitation infrastructure resulting in the spread of disease or threatening a community's ability to maintain its economy, geographic location and cultural tradition, leading to mental stress. Through monitoring of some basic indicators...... communities can begin to develop a response to climate change. With this information, planners, engineers, health care professionals and governments can begin to develop approaches to address the challenges related to climate change....
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Our knowledge on climate change
International Nuclear Information System (INIS)
Turkenburg, W.C.; Van Wijk, A.J.M.
1991-01-01
A workshop was organised to evaluate and discuss the report 'Scientific Assessment of Climate Change (1990)' of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Thirty prominent Dutch experts in the field attended the workshop. The introductions and discussions held on our knowledge of climatic change as a result of the growth of the greenhouse effect caused by the emission of greenhouse gases from human actions are presented. It is concluded that the IPCC-report shows in a clear and balanced way the certainties and uncertainties in our knowledge of climate change. There is a large chance that the earth's climate will change considerably, if the policy remains unamended. 15 figs., 2 apps
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From inferential statistics to climate knowledge
H. N. Maia, A.; Meinke, H.
2006-01-01
International audience; Climate variability and change are risk factors for climate sensitive activities such as agriculture. Managing these risks requires "climate knowledge", i.e. a sound understanding of causes and consequences of climate variability and knowledge of potential management options that are suitable in light of the climatic risks posed. Often such information about prognostic variables (e.g. yield, rainfall, run-off) is provided in probabilistic terms (e.g. via cumulative dis...
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Climate Prediction Center - Expert Assessments Index
Weather Service NWS logo - Click to go to the NWS home page Climate Prediction Center Home Site Map News Web resources and services. HOME > Monitoring and Data > Global Climate Data & Maps > ; Global Regional Climate Maps Regional Climate Maps Banner The Monthly regional analyses products are
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Naveh, Eitan; Katz-Navon, Tal
2015-01-01
This study presents and tests an intervention to enhance organizational climate and expands existing conceptualization of organizational climate to include its influence on employee behaviors outside the organization's physical boundaries. In addition, by integrating the literatures of climate and work-family interface, the study explored climate spillover and crossover from work to the home domain. Focusing on an applied practical problem within organizations, we investigated the example of road safety climate and employees' and their families' driving, using a longitudinal study design of road safety intervention versus control groups. Results demonstrated that the intervention increased road safety climate and decreased the number of traffic violation tickets and that road safety climate mediated the relationship between the intervention and the number of traffic violation tickets. Road safety climate spilled over to the family domain but did not cross over to influence family members' driving. (c) 2015 APA, all rights reserved.