Resources

In 2014, AGCI completed a second study intended to support the City of Aspen in preparing for the impacts of climate change through resiliency planning. More information about the City's resiliency planning effort can be found on their website, www.ourfutureaspen.com.

This report examines potential impacts to, and vulnerabilities of, area ecosystems, socioeconomics, and climatic conditions. The emphasis of this study is on how mountain snow may change and the subsequent cascade of impacts. Adaptations can be employed to reduce vulnerability to some impacts, particularly in the highly managed and built environment. Impacts to plant and animal communities, water resources, and recreational and cultural pursuits cannot be avoided; however, the extent of these impacts can be greatly reduced by a low emissions path and adequate planning and implementation of necessary adaptations.

This report utilizes California as a regional case study to categorize and visualize scientific uncertainties and assess the state of the art emission and climate models with an emphasis on the regional scale. The report addresses the following key questions: 1) What are the range of possible SRES scenarios; how likely are they; how can subjective probabilities be assigned, and at what levels of confidence; what methods are most promising in such estimation; and how vexing is the lack of subjective probabilities for regional analyses for the California case study? 2) How well do GCMs do at producing meteorological variables at regional scales, and which of the various strategies to improve GCMs provide the greatest direct aid in improving knowledge of and confidence in the California regional modeling efforts and assessment strategies? 3) Utilizing California as a regional case study, how can the assessment and eventual reduction of uncertainties upstream, combined with improved downscaling models, better inform regional decision-making and resource management, and what are the stakes? 4) What elements of integrated analyses are essentially unknowable? Can robust strategies (Lempert and Schlesinger, 2000) be developed in spite of those aspects of analysis?

In recent years, the topic of abrupt climate change has risen to a place of prominence in both scientific and popular discourse. The subject of abrupt climate change was addressed at a meeting held at the Aspen Global Change Institute in 2005, and the proceedings of that meeting are summarized in this article. In short, the concern among scientists is that melting freshwater could drastically impact ocean circulation, leading to an abrupt change in global climate. Such an event is believed to have occurred in the last ice age when the world may have experienced up to a 10 degree shift in temperature. However, during the AGCI meeting scientists reported on the results of climate model runs that suggest that major disruption of ocean currents is not an anticipated outcome of global warming. The general consensus of scientists by the end of the meeting was that too much focus on abrupt climate change may serve as a dangerous distraction from addressing the more realistic concerns of climate change such as sea level rise.

Industrial Carbon Management (ICM) refers to the array of technologies that enable the combustion of fossil fuels while substantially reducing or eliminating carbon emissions. Although there is a great deal of technical understanding on this subject, knowledge is isolated within a small group of technologists and little is understood about the effects of these technologies on public policy. As part of AGCI's ongoing Elements of Change series, this report summarizes discussions that took place on this topic at an AGCI meeting in 2000. Within the report is a brief review of ICM technologies, an analysis of their role in mitigating CO2 emissions, and a discussion of the challenges ICM poses to public policy.

The U.S. Global Change Research Program Act of 1990 requires the U.S. government to do periodic climate impact assessments of the United States. This Elements of Change report serves as a guide to help outline the content and approach taken for this important assessment. The content of this report reflects the discussions that took place at a 1997 AGCI meeting among federal agency representatives, university academics, and others. During the meeting, participants explored the critical scientific issues relating to the assessment and drafted a plan for its completion.

Much attention in climate modeling has focused on how to downscale from large scale model output to smaller scales in order to resolve critical features such as mountain ranges. This Elements of Change report looks at the other side of the scale problem. It addresses the problem of known as upcaling, which is scaling from areas measured in square meters to larger aggregates. In this report are discussions of the practical and theoretical problems that arise with upscaling in a variety of regions. Since upscaling is widely required in models that forecast climate and other forms of global change, a better apprehension of this topic will serve to improve our models and understanding of key change.

Characterizing uncertainty is a major issue in all scientific discourse, but it is of particular importance in climate change research. Widely publicized climate change findings, such as the periodic reports authored by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), must find precision in their language so that the published findings are neither understated nor exaggerated and can be taken seriously by policymakers, the media, and the public. This Elements of Change report tackles this problem by summarizing the proceedings of a 1996 AGCI meeting that was convened to discuss how uncertainty is communicated in reports such as the one put out by the IPCC. In attendance were climate change researchers, policy analysts, and media experts, and this report addresses scientific, media, and policy related issues pertaining to uncertainty.

Societal ability to understand, build resiliency, and respond to natural hazards will be put to the test as global environmental changes, such as climate change, are likely to make natural disasters and hazard more common. This Elements of Change report discusses the main components of natural disaster reduction and illustrates why better disaster management and response is necessary in face of looming environmental change. Included in this report is a description of expected environmental changes that pose a threat to society, suggested procedures for natural disaster reduction, and the role of various private, government, civilian sectors in reducing the impacts of natural hazards.