Science of the Climate Crisis
From Common Energy UVic
This section of the Knowledge Base describes how the science of the climate crisis has entered a new phase. While the reality and causes of climate change are no longer in doubt, as has been known for some time only now culminating in the IPCC 4th Assessment. There remains considerable debate about the impacts. This debate is both fascinating and important. The observation and prediction of climate change impacts reveals the limits of our capacity to understand the highly complex and dynamic world we live in.
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[edit] Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
The largest organization for aggregating and understanding the science of climate change. While the Summary is a negotiated document between scientists and governments, it is still the most up-to-date and accepted evaluation of the present state of the science. Due to its nature as a government document, it is also one of the most conservative. Its 2007 report is being released in four stages.
[edit] Working Group I: The Physical Science Basis
[edit] Working Group II: Impacts, Adaptations, and Vulnerability
The two most interesting parts of this summary were the focus on the disparate impacts on the people least responsible for global warming and least able to deal with it. And, the well publicized, and quite successful, efforts of China, Russian, India, Saudi Arabia, and the United States to soften the language.
- Summary for Policy Makers
- Dire Warming Report too Soft, Scientists Say
- Media release from the Tyndall Center for Climate Change Research
Summary in a New York Times editorial:
The report from the intergovernmental panel was the second of three due this year. The first concluded with “90 percent certainty” that humans had caused the rise in atmospheric temperatures over the last half-century. The most recent focused on the consequences, few of them positive.
The northern latitudes will have longer growing seasons. But elsewhere climate change will lead to more severe storms, the flooding of tropical islands and coastlines inhabited by hundreds of millions of people, the likely extinction of at least one-fourth of the world’s species and, in poorer countries in Asia and Africa, drought and hunger.[1]
[edit] Working Group III: Mitigation
This report is expected in the third quarter.
[edit] Final Synthesis
This is expected late in the year.
Links:
[edit] At the University of Victoria
Dr. Andrew Weaver's presentation in Common Energy's Climate, Energy, and Society lecture series gave an overview of the scientific consensus around anthropogenic climate change. In particular, he highlighted both the speed at which we are seeing the predicted effects of climate change and the massive cuts to emissions of greenhouse gasses that will be required to avoid catastrophic change.
He suggests our targets should be on the order of 90% reductions by 2050 and 50% reductions as soon as possible.
The Canadian Institute for Climate Studies is based at UVic, housed within the Centre for Global Studies. It is the secretariat of the Pacific Climate Impacts Consortium.
The Canadian Centre for Climate Modelling and Analysis is also based at UVic, housed in the Ian Stewart complex. It is a government research lab.
The UVic Climate Modelling Group internationally recognized for its Earth System Climate Model. Andrew Weaver is one of the principle researchers in the group.
Links:
- Media release from UVic:Second climate change report assesses impacts
- Media release from UVic:UVic climatologist named BCs top academic
[edit] Post 2007 IPCC
The World Resource Institute has produced brief, Climate Science 2006 Major New Discoveries, that summarizes the latest findings to March 2007.
Also, according to a report published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in the US, Global and Regional Drivers Accelerating CO2 emissions, the rate at which emissions are increasing has accelerated. This acceleration is caused by a combination of the higher than expected contributions from industrializing poor countries and a leveling off of the decreasing carbon intensity of wealthy countries. It is particularly notable as it shows that things are worse than many of the worst case scenarios.
[edit] The Impacts of Climate Change
The Global Business Network's report Impacts of Climate Change: A System Vulnerability Approach to Consider the Potential Impacts to 2050 of a Mid-Upper Greenhouse Gas Emissions Scenario outlines the impacts from a primarily American-centric perspective. Its systems vulnerability approach reverses the regular perspective for understanding impacts: Instead of starting with climate change and working out toward impacts, we focus on systems that are already generally vulnerable first, and then consider what the geophysics of climate change might do to them. (p.3)
The report looks at the impact of climate change on human and non-human systems, particularly ones that are already stressed, and explores the possibilities of both rapid and gradual changes in climate in relation to them. In particular, it examines the probability of climate change driving these systems past tipping points where they are dramatically quantitatively and qualitatively altered. This approach makes it easier for particular people in particular contexts to explore the possible consequences of the climate crisis for them. It gives a more solid and familiar footing for people to apply localized and interdisciplinary perspectives than the somewhat more abstract "globalized" information they are often presented with.
While the report uses data from a previous IPCC assessment and is therefore somewhat out of date, its analytical framework and concepts are useful. For example, in explaining how climate is a dynamic and chaotic system it points out that it is important to dismiss the "fallacy of averages." That is to say, it is important to dispel the notion that the entire planet will experience equal and gradual temperate increases. Instead, there will be variations across different regions (e.g., more warming near the poles than at the equator) and it will be characterized by more variability within the climate of regions and more extreme weather events. In other words, there will be both greater standard deviations in weather (overall fluctuations), and greater excursions from the global mean (localized changes).
The increasing frequency of extreme events coupled with their inherently unpredictable nature will cause severe damage through threshold effects. Threshold effects will occur as climate change impacts, potentially layered with and compounding themselves and other stresses, push a system past its built-in resiliency and over a threshold at which point the system suffers badly, often leading to tipping points. These non-linear impacts are described well by thinking about levees. The difference between a river rising to overflow the levee one day and failing to do so another may only be a difference in water height of 5 or 10 percent. But, the difference in terms of economic damage is exponentially greater when the levee is flooded as the water rises past the point that it was ever expected to by planners making decisions based on a different climate. Threshold effects will be particularly damaging and ubiquitous in ecological systems, for example the impact of extended drought or heat waves will be severe in many places where the ecological systems have not evolved to deal with such things.
The traditional method for assessing impacts dilutes predictions of the impacts on human systems because that information is, at best, several steps removed from what scientists will agree are facts. By starting with the "objects of change," instead of with climate, it is much easier to make confident predictions about probable impacts.
For this layered and system focused approach consider the impact of climate change on a bursting mega-city of the global south.
As they point out:
It is worth noting here that many of these vulnerable systems are interconnected in complex and profound ways. As the global macrosystem becomes increasingly complex and interconnected, it also becomes more vulnerable to cascading failures. A single stressed system, when confronted by the acute impacts of climate change, may generate results even more surprising or extreme than what we depict here... (p. 7)
[edit] The Challenge to Science
The dynamics of the climate crisis have been pushing the traditional practice of science to its boundaries. Amongst other things, the overt politicization of science, most apparent in the IPCC process where governments are able to censor the work of the scientific community, is challenging the "objective" role of scientists.
More profoundly, it is challenging our conceptions of what we as a society can know, and what we can and should do with that knowledge.
[edit] Precautionary Principle
The precautionary principle is a guide for making decisions when there is high risk and high uncertainty (i.e., in relation to most potential climate change impacts). Most environmental regulatory bodies place the burden of proof on those who want to show that something harms the environment. Given the complexity of the relationships between things like chemicals and the environment, and given the long time frames that such effects can take place over, this is often very difficult.
The precautionary principle reverses the burden of proof. When there are high risks and little certainty about the impacts of a proposed policy, technology, or other measure, the precautionary principle demands that it be proved safe. This principle is highly controversial because shifting responsibility thusly has significant consequences for industry. Consider the case of genetically modified foods: the cost to firms of proving that their new technologies will not have a negative impact on the environment is quite different than the cost they face of defending themselves against government regulation after government scientists find that the technologies have had an impact. Furthermore, and more to the point, there is a far greater likelihood that many of these new technologies would never be released into the environment if the precautionary principle was applied.
The implications of the precautionary principle for the politics of the climate crisis are profound. It suggests that if we are going to deal with the challenges of the climate crisis we must take very seriously the possibility of catastrophic change and we must be careful about the solutions, particularly the technological solutions, that we use to respond to this challenge.
Links:
- The Bay Area Working Group on the Precautionary Principle has a well-written explanation here: Taking Precaution
