With few data, Arctic carbon models lack consensus

A press release from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory: As climate change grips the Arctic, how much carbon is leaving its thawing soil and adding to Earth's greenhouse effect? The question has long been debated by scientists. A new study conducted as part of NASA's Carbon in Arctic Reservoirs Vulnerability Experiment (CARVE) shows just how much work still needs to be done to reach a conclusion on this and other basic questions about the region where global warming is hitting hardest.

Lead author Josh Fisher of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California, analyzed 40 computer models of the amounts and flows of carbon in the Alaskan Arctic and boreal ecosystems. His team found wide disagreement among the models, highlighting the urgent need for more measurements from the region.

Models represent scientists' integrated understanding of Earth processes and systems. They are used both to test that understanding, by comparing their results with real-world observations, and to gain insight into how current trends may affect our planet's future.

"We all knew there were big uncertainties in our understanding, and we wanted to quantify their extent," said Fisher. That extent proved to be greater than almost anyone expected. "The results were shocking to most people," he said.

However, pinpointing the extent and areas of uncertainty is the first step toward reducing them. Fisher noted that he has shared preliminary results with the modelers who participated in the study, and some have already used the results as an opportunity to rethink how they are representing Arctic processes in global models. Moreover, the uncertainty maps that the study produced, showing the specific Arctic regions where the disagreement is greatest, highlight key locations for field campaigns to collect data.

The study, which involved 30 co-authors from around the world, examined how well the models agreed on various factors, such as the rate of plant growth and the amount of carbon exchanged between living things and the atmosphere. They also evaluated the performance of the models against measurements of carbon at monitoring sites along the tundra of the Alaskan North Slope.

"If all the models agree with the observations, uncertainty is probably pretty low. If they wildly disagree, uncertainty is pretty high," Fisher said. "The models were all over the board."....

Tundra in the Russian Arctic on Bolshaya Muksalma Island, shot by Aleksander Kaasik, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons 3.0 license 

Scientists unmask the climate uncertainty monster

A press release from the University of Bristol

: Increasing uncertainty in the climate system compels a greater urgency for climate change mitigation, according to new research from the University of Bristol. Scientific uncertainty has been described as a 'monster' that prevents understanding and delays mitigative action in response to climate change.  New research by Professor Stephan Lewandowsky of the University of Bristol, and international colleagues, shows that uncertainty should make us more rather than less concerned about climate change.

In two companion papers, published today in Climatic Change, the researchers investigated the mathematics of uncertainty in the climate system and showed that increased scientific uncertainty necessitates even greater action to mitigate climate change.

The scientists used an ordinal approach – a range of mathematical methods that address the question: 'What would the consequences be if uncertainty is even greater than we think it is?'

They show that as uncertainty in the temperature increase expected with a doubling of CO2 from pre-industrial levels rises, so do the economic damages of increased climate change.  Greater uncertainty also increases the likelihood of exceeding 'safe' temperature limits and the probability of failing to reach mitigation targets.  The authors highlight this with the case of future sea level, as larger uncertainty in sea level rise requires greater precautionary action to manage flood risk.

Professor Lewandowsky, Chair in Cognitive Psychology and member of the Cabot Institute at the University of Bristol, said: "We can understand the implications of uncertainty, and in the case of the climate system, it is very clear that greater uncertainty will make things even worse. This means that we can never say that there is too much uncertainty for us to act.  If you appeal to uncertainty to make a policy decision the legitimate conclusion is to increase the urgency of mitigation."

Co-author, Dr James Risbey of Australia’s CSIRO Marine and Atmospheric Research, said: "Some point to uncertainty as a way to minimize the climate change problem, when in fact it means that the problem is more likely to be worse than expected in the absence of that uncertainty.  This result is robust to a range of assumptions and shows that uncertainty does not excuse inaction."...

The Allegory of Immortality, Giulio Romano

Melting glaciers bring energy uncertainty

Javaid Laghari in Nature: Running 2,000 kilometres from east to west and comprising more than 60,000 square kilometres of ice, the Hindu Kush–Karakoram–Himalayan glaciers are a source of water for the quarter of the global population that lives in south Asia. Glaciers are natural stores and regulators of water supply to rivers, which, in turn, provide water for domestic and industrial consumption, energy generation and irrigation.

Ice cover is decreasing in this region, as for most glaciers in the world, as a result of global warming. Between 2003 and 2009, Himalayan glaciers lost an estimated 174 gigatonnes of water each year, and contributed to catastrophic floods of the Indus, Ganges and Brahmaputra rivers. Pollution is accelerating the melt. An 'Asian brown cloud', formed from the 2 million tonnes of soot and dark particles released into the atmosphere every year, mostly from India and China, warms the air and surface ice.

Seasonal meltwater serves as the main source of power for an increasing number of hydroelectric dams on the rivers served by the glaciers. But hydropower faces a difficult future in south Asia because of climatic, environmental and politico-economic factors. The region is starved of energy, and power shortages of up to 20 hours a day are stunting development. Importing oil and gas from the Gulf, Iran or Tajikistan is expensive or politically difficult. So countries are turning to indigenous hydroelectric power, and to other renewable energies such as solar and wind, for cheap, sustainable energy.

Hydroelectric power must play a part in south Asia's low-carbon energy future. But to be effective, governments around the Himalayas need to work together to measure and model glacier retreat, changing river flows and their impact on hydroelectric power generation. Political obstacles to dam construction and watershed management must also be overcome.

Glaciers feed thousands of miles of rivers in Pakistan. The largest, the river Indus, depends on glacial waters for half of its flow. But near the river's source, in mountains in the Indian-administered state of Jammu and Kashmir, the glaciers are thinning at an alarming rate of 0.7 metres per year. The Ganges and Brahmaputra rivers in India and Bangladesh are similarly threatened by glacial melting in the regions of their headwaters....

Durung Drung glacier and Nun-Kun twin peaks (7100m), Zanskar, Jammu & Kashmir, India, shot by BasinField, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

Warming is not the crucial uncertainty

Jon Cartwright in Environmental Research Web: Governments often have to perform cost-benefit analyses to determine which is the best climate policy. For instance, a more stringent fuel-efficiency target may cost car companies money to implement today, but that must be weighed up against the potential environmental damage, in terms of cost, that higher emissions would generate in the future. Such costs cannot be known for certain; they always have a degree of uncertainty.

Unfortunately, this uncertainty is often complex. For example, sea ice melts when heated, leaving less reflective ocean water in its place. Melting sea ice "non-linearly" translates into a large temperature increase because the water left absorbs more heat, creating more warming and thereby melting more sea ice.

Now economist Derek Lemoine at the University of Arizona and climate scientist Haewon McJeon at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory have investigated how nonlinear climate and economic uncertainties interact with one another, to affect the costs of different climate policies.

The pair began with a model of the energy system and the economy, and input 380 different technology scenarios – for instance, where there is a breakthrough in renewable energy or in nuclear power. For each of these scenarios, they figured out the best way, or policy, to keep carbon dioxide emissions beneath a certain concentration. This defined the cost of the policy, so that the researchers could then determine how much damage climate change would have to inflict to make that policy more economically sensible than doing nothing.

One result was that, under a wide range of scenarios, a carbon dioxide target of 500 parts per million (ppm) was most sensible; a lower target of 450 ppm was cost-effective only if the future sees major breakthroughs in low-carbon technology, or if high warming causes exceptional damage. (The current carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere is just over 400 ppm.)

By doing their analysis, however, Lemoine and McJeon could see which assumptions most strongly affected whether or not a policy was economically sensible. Contrary to popular belief, they found that the uncertainty in future technology, and the uncertainty in damage caused by warming, are more important economic parameters than the uncertainty in the amount of predicted warming....

A 2009 flood in the UK, shot by Patrick Mackie, Wikimedia Commons via Geograph UK, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license

Agencies, insurers look at coastal areas

Robb Fulcher in Easy Reader News: Insurers have been trying to anticipate the danger of flooding, wildfire and drought in coastal areas, which could accompany climate change from greenhouse gas emissions and other factors, a researcher told a symposium co-sponsored by the City of Hermosa Beach.

A number of scientists, including Nobel Prize winners, told how government agencies, researchers and private-sector organizations are attempting to plan for deeply uncertain scenarios presaged by climate-change research, at the Monday symposium held at the sprawling Northrop Grumman plant in Redondo Beach.

…Sean B. Hecht, executive director of the UCLA Environmental Law Center, said Lloyd’s of London and other large “re-insurers” — which insure the insurance companies against losses — are mulling possible coastal effects of climate change including wildfires, and flooding and storms from rising sea levels. Insurers drive much of our behavior, Hecht said, because investments cannot be made, businesses cannot be launched and developments cannot be built unless they can be insured.

But, he said, insurers cannot be counted on to discourage risky behavior. Government regulators aim to keep insurance affordable, which can encourage possibly risky actions such as dense development in attractive coastal areas and “serial rebuilding” in areas that see regular flooding, Hecht said.

Entities willing to plan for possible effects of climate change include water agencies such as the Metropolitan Water District, which are required to prepare long-term plans for water availability, Robert J. Lempert, a scholar in the field of “decision making under conditions of deep uncertainty,” told the symposium.

…“Deep uncertainty” exists in climate change scenarios, Lempert said. He encourages long-range planners to “run their plans backwards,” identifying where they are vulnerable, determining what fixes could be made, and then studying the costs of the fixes….

A statue of a surfer in Hermosa Beach, shot by Christophe.Finot, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Generic license

Universities receive grants to study climate change decisions

Red Orbit: The National Science Foundation recently awarded nearly $5 million to four university-based centers whose research focuses on understanding decision making within the context of climate change and other long-term environmental risks.

The awards bring together scholars from many different fields, such as decision science, psychology, economics, geography, atmospheric science, engineering, mathematics and computer science, to identify effective ways to make decisions when both the nature of the problems and the potential impacts of responses are uncertain.

"These centers are taking a novel approach to environmental decision making," said Cheryl Eavey, a program director in NSF's Division of Social and Economic Sciences (SBE) and one of three co-managers of the awards. "Together, they are examining problems in coordinated ways that have not been undertaken in the past, and they are actively working with practitioners and stakeholders to facilitate the use of basic knowledge in practical ways."

These awards were supported by SBE through its Decision Making Under Uncertainty (DMUU) funding opportunity. Comparable levels of support are expected to be provided for the following four years to enable these teams to conduct longer-range, integrated research, education, and outreach activities.

"The DMUU research teams are examining many questions regarding how people and organizations understand climate change and other long-term environmental risks and how those understandings influence their plans to react to changing environmental conditions," said co-manager Thomas Baerwald, senior science advisor in NSF's Division of Behavioral and Cognitive Sciences. "In addition to understanding the varied approaches that are used for different kinds of problems, a special challenge is to understand how effective decisions can be made across a number of environmental policy issues when long-term outcomes are uncertain."…

Rodin's "Thinker," taken in Musee Rodin in Paris, France by wikipedian Pufacz

Climate change and insurance, or, hope is not a strategy

Ken Wolslegel in Environmental Leader: ….The insurance industry is a good lens to view the effects of climate change: first, because it is the largest industry on earth and thus, is truly global, and second, because central to the industry’s profitability is recognizing loss trends within the marketplace and adjusting rates, deductibles or coverage accordingly. The art and science of understanding loss trends is known as “attribution.”

…In the case of climate change however, attribution of a storm event, a drought, or the proliferation of a new invasive species is less clear. Attribution of individual events to a global phenomenon like climate change is inherently onerous and fraught with opportunities for obfuscation. Put another way, the scale and complexity of climate change is such that its current effects like the worldwide disappearance (melting) of glaciers or the Pine Beetle superinfestation decimating Canadian forests is easily obscured by opponents of action or by current economic woes.

The difficult attribution of singular events to the broad specter of climate change is perhaps the biggest barrier the insurance industry faces in making adjustments. For better or for worse, we live in a world where empirical proof is usually required before we act. Given the stakes presented in the majority of climate models’ “most likely” outcomes, it seems ridiculous to operate in the business-as-usual mentality.

…[T]he US insurance industry has hardly begun its nascent efforts at preparing for a new reality and insurance products which respond to climate change are slow in coming. The failure to prepare leaves the US insurance industry vulnerable, and some who study the problem predict mounting losses, the failure of weaker carriers, and a shrinking of the industry. Contraction in the US insurance industry will spell opportunity for European markets who have been preparing for decades. An old boss of mine used to say: “‘hope’ is not a strategy.” However, continuing the wait for empirical proof is just that. It is time for the US insurance industry to make a reasonable attribution of climate change data and prepare, before it pays an even bigger price than it already has.

Bird Island, FL, August 21, 2008 -- Houses on Sea Gate Circle in the North Brevard County community are locked in by the flooding from Tropical Storm Fay. State and Federal teams have started assessing the extent of damage caused by the slow storm throughout the Central Coastal and North Central regions of Florida. Barry Bahler/FEMA

Development community must accept uncertainty

Anna Barrett has a great report in Climate Feedback: Uncertainty in regional climate projections isn’t going away, and that’s an inconvenient truth the development community will have to face, says Christoph Müller of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impacts Research in Germany. Müller recently authored a report on expected climate change impacts in sub-Saharan Africa, at the behest of the German Development Institute (GDI), a Bonn-based think tank. A top recommendation of the final report, published 24 April and presented at the IHDP conference last month, is that adaptation strategies should not be motivated by specific impact projections, but instead should work on reducing vulnerability to environmental change in general.

An expert on climate impacts on agriculture and land-use, Müller found while scoping the report for GDI that there was a mistaken assumption by development experts that many of the current uncertainties in predicting climate change will soon clear up. “In the adaptation community, they often have the feeling that if we wait for another five years, we will know exactly what the weather will be,” he says.

So he turned the focus of the report around from cataloging impacts to dealing with uncertainty. “This report basically is trying to raise awareness that you will never get very accurate projections of what you will have to adapt to. Don’t wait for that. You have to adapt to uncertainty,” says Müller. I talked to Müller to find out more about what adaptation planners in sub-Saharan Africa are up against and how they might tackle changes they can't forsee. What climate models agree on is that the continent will warm a bit more than the global average - roughly 2.0 to 4.5 degrees centigrade, according to three emissions scenarios of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

…And if you’re not sure what kind of change you’ll be facing, says Müller, the best adaptation options are the “classical approaches” of development aid, such as trying to diversify income sources and reducing dependence on a single factor like crop yields. “What climate change adds is extra uncertainty, and an extra challenge for politics to respond to,” he says....

Magic 8 ball shot by ChristianHeldt