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AGCI workshops provide 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 - 2 of 2 records
Science for Climate Change Adaptation: Enhancing Decision-Support Capacity
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
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