Climate Change: What You Need To Know

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Image Credit: SAGES

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.

The UKCP09 Scottish User Community Meeting, held on 1 February at eSI, sought to create a group of users that can work with climate modellers to bridge this communication gap. The participants came from disparate fields, from forestry to heritage, representing the wide range of organisations that need to develop robust policies to cope with climate change.

One of the main things users want to be able to do is to identify the threshold at which a particular harm occurs, and then look up the risk of that threshold being reached. It’s all very well determining that a certain increase in river flow will lead to floods in a particular area, but how exactly does that relate to the rainfall predictions from a climate model? The more modelling is involved, the more steps there are beyond the basic climate prediction, the harder it is to answer such questions with any great reliability.

Some of this work is simply very numerically intensive. In forestry, for example, trees being planted now will last for thirty to fifty years, so foresters need to know now what the future climate is likely to be,. Understanding the weather risks and climate vulnerabilities of different types of trees in different types of location means crunching a lot of data, some of which is quite tricky to work with.

In other fields, the problem is even more complex. Fully understanding how climate change will affect our natural heritage would mean predicting the impact on every single species. This is clearly impracticable, but even just focusing on a few key species isn’t as simple as it sounds. A wide range of species in Scotland are dependent on heather, for example, and understanding how climate change will affect heather means getting to grips with physical geology – and so on.

The user community in Scotland can help by integrating disparate knowledge, cutting across organisational and disciplinary boundaries, and creating case studies and briefing notes in key areas. With limited resources, it is not possible to model every possible impact of climate change – which makes it all the more important to share information and avoid needless duplication of effort.

If this programme is successful, it should lead to better decision making, and increased engagement in climate change planning, by organisations in Scotland. Over the next six months to a year, Kerr and his colleagues will track whether greater resilience is being built in Scotland, and whether organisations are getting better at understanding the risks of climate change. The work of this meeting in building a community is just the start – the real test will be how well interest is transformed into action.

More information on Communicating the e-Science of Climate Change is available at http://www.nesc.ac.uk/esi/themes/theme_10/