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AGCI workshops provides a much-needed forum to bring together natural and social scientists – ecologists, oceanographers, atmospheric chemists, and climate experts along with political scientists, population dynamicists, anthropologists, sociologists, and educators – enabling them to work together at the cutting edge of a variety of topics of critical importance in the global change arena.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 48 records
Science for Climate Change Adaptation: Enhancing Decision-Support Capability
5 August - 10 August 2012
The IPCC Fourth Assessment Report in 2007 relied heavily on the SRES scenarios that were run in global coupled climate models to produce climate change information on various timescales in the future. Formally, none of the SRES scenarios were mitigation scenarios (although one achieved GHG concentrations without explicit climate policies at a level that now seems ambitious). Research on responses was commonly segregated into two efforts: mitigation to prevent further contributions to climate change, and adaptation to prepare for and manage climate changes that are unavoidable. In the intervening years, there has been substantial evolution in the framing of the climate change issue. The societal challenge is now being framed as a combination of adaptation, to respond to changes to which the climate system is already committed over the next several decades, and mitigation, where efforts started now will have significant consequences for the magnitude and nature of climate change and associated impacts after mid-century. The emerging emphasis on "adaptive risk management", now reflected in the approach of US National Climate Assessment, seeks to integrate adaptation and mitigation. The new Representative Concentration Pathway (RCP) scenarios grew out of collaborations between the integrated assessment and climate modeling communities that were started in part at an AGCI session in 2006. The RCPs do not provide socioeconomic scenarios, and these are currently being developed to support research on impacts, adaptation, and vulnerability, as well as anthropogenic forcing and mitigation. This is important because achieving the lower RCPs will clearly require explicit mitigation policies. At the same time, a new field of climate science called decadal climate prediction is attempting to produce more viable climate change information for adaptation planning and decision support over the next thirty years or so. View
Climate Sensitivity on Decadal to Century Timescales: Implications for Civilization
20 May - 25 May 2012
AGCI's upcoming workshop explores the implications of the longer term response of the Earth to elevated co2 and the implications for civilization. Scientists characterize the response of the Earth's global average temperature to a doubling of CO2 from pre-industrial levels as the Earth's climate sensitivity. For over twenty years the value for climate sensitivity utilized in most climate models is in the range of 1.5 to 4.5 deg C. Socio-economic scenarios for this century utilized by the IPCC provide estimates of future radiatively important emissions to drive a set of climate models to produce a climate response by the end of the century of between 1.8 to 4.0 deg C. When longer timeframes are considered there are strong indications from the record of the Earth's past that additional feedback mechanisms come into play that build upon the fast feedbacks of this century yielding a greater climate sensitivity and significantly higher global average temperature. These so called slow feedbacks include changes in glacial ice, release of methane and carbon dioxide from thawing of permafrost land areas, and release of methane from continental shelf deposits. The consequence of this for the biosphere -- its ecosystem and services -- places civilization in unchartered territory beyond the scope of the usually discussed mitigation and adaption strategies. Given this more dramatic scale of change humanity is possibly facing, what are appropriate responses? An interdisciplinary group designed to provide insight into the physical climate, biological interactions, and socio-economic ramifications of this question will assemble in May to explore this question and report on their findings. View
Informing a Forest Health Index and Bioclimatic Monitoring Network for the Roaring Fork Valley
20 January - 20 January 2012
In support of For the Forest and their effort to produce an annual "State of the Forest" report, the Aspen Global Change Institute is bringing together experts on bioclimatic monitoring, forest ecology, adaptive management, and climate change to provide input on the development of a Forest Health Index and the priorities components of a bioclimatic monitoring system that could inform the public and resource managers in the Roaring Fork Valley. View
Making Sense of the multi-model decadal prediction experiments from CMIP5
26 June - 1 July 2011
This 2011 workshop on decadal modeling is a follow-up to a 2008 AGCI session where participants formulated a first-ever experimental design to address the science issues involved with decadal prediction that became incorporated in the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project phase 5 (CMIP5). Since decadal prediction is new for the climate science community, most of the decadal experiments for CMIP5 are hindcasts designed to quantify expected skill of the predictions. The purpose of this session is to make sense of the decadal hindcasts/predictions in terms of evaluation metrics, skill quantification, and summary figures that communicate the synthesis of the multi-model results. The product of the session will be a journal article that can then be assessed as part of the IPCC AR5. Participants will be asked to prepare some preliminary diagnostics in advance of the meeting. This will be the first time a synthesis will be attempted of a multi-model dataset of decadal hindcasts/predictions and will be crucial in order to make a vital contribution to the IPCC AR5. View
Global Change and the Solar-Terrestrial Environment
12 June - 17 June 2010
This workshop will convene scientists who study the solar-terrestrial environment and those who study global change. The purpose is to assess our level of understanding of the system by: identifying recent advances connecting solar changes to changes in Earth's global environment in the context of changes in greenhouse gases, aerosols, and land cover; identifying gaps in our knowledge; and identifying interdisciplinary research topics to improve predictions of solar-terrestrial influences on Earth's global environment and its people in the context of the full range of global change forcings and feedbacks. In short - What do we know? What don't we know? What are the top four research projects that can improve our present knowledge? View
State of the Global Phosphorus Cycle
30 September - 4 October 2009
Roughly a generation ago, environmental scientists began a concentrated effort to document the extent, pace and consequences of human alteration to Earth's major biogeochemical cycles. Though much work has been done in this arena, compared to the state of our knowledge on carbon and nitrogen cycles, knowledge of phosphorus lags behind. While we know humans are changing the P cycle, we lack a quantitative picture at regional scales of how much, how fast, and in what ways. Such information is essential not only for predicting well-recognized consequences of P enrichment, such as aquatic eutrophication, but also for understanding the ways in which the global C and N cycles will continue to evolve. Finally, useful reserves of reactive P are finite, and the long-term sustainability of intensive agricultural systems depends on the careful management of P reserves. Like nitrogen, the majority of human-driven changes to the P cycle are linked to modern agriculture, and thus prior assessments of the N cycle will be enormously helpful to the efforts for P. This AGCI meeting was held to finalize a strategy to complete the assessment for P, identify components of the work that individual participants would lead, and galvanize the entire process. View
Advanced Climate Modeling and Decision-Making Support of Climate Services
20 September - 24 September 2009
This workshop invites leading climate scientists, decision-makers, planners, and climate change impacts experts to explore linkages between advanced climate change science modeling and water resource management and planning. The aims of this workshop include indentifying what current knowledge can be utilized by decision-makers, finding gaps in the information supplied by current modeling tools, and developing strategies to supplement decision support across different timescales. Additional attention will also be given to coastal vulnerability-reduction decision-making. View
Managing the Cycles of Nitrogen and Phosphorus: Mitigation and Adaptation
22 October - 25 October 2008
The human impact on global cycles of nitrogen (N) and phosphorus (P) has been a recent focus of global change scientists. In this session, a small working group convened to focus on identifying and developing the information that society needs to respond effectively to anthropogenic changes in the cycles of N and P. View
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