Climate Change: What You Need To Know
From the C5 to the Segway, technological history is littered with the wrecks of products, created with great effort and ingenuity, that were simply not what the consumer needed. Are climate change predictions doomed to the same fate? Are the models failing to give policymakers and planners the information they need to cope with the effects of global warming?
That’s the worry that led Andrew Kerr to run the e-Science Institute research theme on “Communicating the e-Science of Climate Change”. A survey of public sector organisations in 2008 found that many of them didn’t use the then-current scenarios of climate change in their planning, because the information presented in them simply wasn’t useful for practical purposes. Will the 2009 UK climate projections (UKCP09) be any more widely used? That depends on whether modellers produce what policymakers require.
