Scientists have a choice concerning what role they should play in political debates and policy formation, particularly in terms of how they present their research. This book is about understanding ...this choice, what considerations are important to think about when deciding, and the consequences of such choices for the individual scientist and the broader scientific enterprise. Rather than prescribing what course of action each scientist ought to take, the book aims to identify a range of options for individual scientists to consider in making their own judgments about how they would like to position themselves in relation to policy and politics. Using examples from a range of scientific controversies and thought-provoking analogies from other walks of life, The Honest Broker challenges us all - scientists, politicians and citizens - to think carefully about how best science can contribute to policy-making and a healthy democracy.
During the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, science advisory mechanisms did not always live up to expectations. What practical steps can the expert community take to improve advisory ...mechanisms in an emergency?
This article summarizes the changes in landscape structure because of human land management over the last several centuries, and using observed and modeled data, documents how these changes have ...altered biogeophysical and biogeochemical surface fluxes on the local, mesoscale, and regional scales. Remaining research issues are presented including whether these landscape changes alter large‐scale atmospheric circulation patterns far from where the land use and land cover changes occur. We conclude that existing climate assessments have not yet adequately factored in this climate forcing. For those regions that have undergone intensive human landscape change, or would undergo intensive change in the future, we conclude that the failure to factor in this forcing risks a misalignment of investment in climate mitigation and adaptation. WIREs Clim Change 2011, 2:828–850. doi: 10.1002/wcc.144
This article is categorized under:
Paleoclimates and Current Trends > Climate Forcing
The common methodology in dynamical regional climate downscaling employs a continuous integration of a limited‐area model with a single initialization of the atmospheric fields and frequent updates ...of lateral boundary conditions based on general circulation model outputs or reanalysis data sets. This study suggests alternative methods that can be more skillful than the traditional one in obtaining high‐resolution climate information. We use the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model with a grid spacing at 36 km over the conterminous U.S. to dynamically downscale the 1‐degree NCEP Global Final Analysis (FNL). We perform three types of experiments for the entire year of 2000: (1) continuous integrations with a single initialization as usually done, (2) consecutive integrations with frequent re‐initializations, and (3) as (1) but with a 3‐D nudging being applied. The simulations are evaluated in a high temporal scale (6‐hourly) by comparison with the 32‐km NCEP North American Regional Reanalysis (NARR). Compared to NARR, the downscaling simulation using the 3‐D nudging shows the highest skill, and the continuous run produces the lowest skill. While the re‐initialization runs give an intermediate skill, a run with a more frequent (e.g., weekly) re‐initialization outperforms that with the less frequent re‐initialization (e.g., monthly). Dynamical downscaling outperforms bi‐linear interpolation, especially for meteorological fields near the surface over the mountainous regions. The 3‐D nudging generates realistic regional‐scale patterns that are not resolved by simply updating the lateral boundary conditions as done traditionally, therefore significantly improving the accuracy of generating regional climate information.
Land Use and Climate Change Pielke, Roger A.
Science (American Association for the Advancement of Science),
12/2005, Letnik:
310, Številka:
5754
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
Change and variability in land use by humans and the resulting alterations in surface features are major but poorly recognized drivers of long-term global climate patterns. Along with the diverse ...influences of aerosols on climate, these spatially heterogeneous land use effects may be at least as important in altering the weather as changes in climate patterns associated with greenhouse gases. On page 1674 of this issue, Feddema et al. report modeling results indicating that future land use and land cover will continue to be an important influence on climate for the next century. One implication of this work is that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which has yet to appreciate the significance of the full range of phenomena that drive climate change, risks rapidly falling behind the evolving science if this effect is not included. Although the impact of land use and land cover on the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide and methane, and on the global average surface albedo, have been included in international climate change assessments, the role of land use and land cover change and variability in altering regional temperatures, precipitation, vegetation, and other climate variables has been mostly ignored.
Abstract
Emissions scenarios used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) are central to climate change research and policy. Here, we identify subsets of scenarios of the IPCC’s 5th ...(AR5) and forthcoming 6th (AR6) Assessment Reports, including the Shared Socioeconomic Pathway scenarios, that project 2005–2050 fossil-fuel-and-industry (FFI) CO
2
emissions growth rates most consistent with observations from 2005 to 2020 and International Energy Agency (IEA) projections to 2050. These scenarios project between 2 °C and 3 °C of warming by 2100, with a median of 2.2 °C. The subset of plausible IPCC scenarios does not represent all possible trajectories of future emissions and warming. Collectively, they project continued mitigation progress and suggest the world is presently on a lower emissions trajectory than is often assumed. However, these scenarios also indicate that the world is still off track from limiting 21st-century warming to 1.5 °C or below 2 °C.
The rehabilitation of the idea of adaptation is overdue and seems straightforward. But there is an elephant in the room: the core assumptions underlying contemporary climate-change policy conflict ...with the goal of increasing resilience to natural climate change and variability.
Global responses of the hydrological cycle to climate change have been widely studied, but uncertainties still remain regarding water vapor responses to lower-tropospheric temperature. Here, we ...investigate the trends in global total precipitable water (TPW) and surface temperature from 1958 to 2021 using ERA5 and JRA-55 reanalysis datasets. We further validate these trends using radiosonde from 1979 to 2019 and Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS) and Special Sensor Microwave Imager/Sounder (SSMIS) observations from 2003 to 2021. Our results indicate a global increase in total precipitable water (TPW) of ∼ 2 % per decade from 1993–2021. These variations in TPW reflect the interactions of global warming feedback mechanisms across different spatial scales. Our results also revealed a significant near-surface temperature (T2 m) warming trend of ∼ 0.15 K decade−1 over the period 1958–2021. The consistent warming at a rate of ∼ 0.21 K decade−1 after 1993 corresponds to a strong water vapor response to temperature at a rate of 9.5 % K−1 globally, with land areas warming approximately twice as fast as the oceans. The relationship between TPW and T2 m showed a variation of around 6 % K−1–8 % K−1 in the 15–55° N latitude band, aligning with theoretical estimates from the Clausius–Clapeyron equation.
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