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Sept. 13, 2007
U.S.
Climate Change Science Program Making Good Progress In
Documenting And Understanding Changes, But
Study Of Impacts On Humans And Communication With Decision Makers Lag
Climate change research directed by the
federal government has made good progress in documenting and
understanding
temperature trends and related environmental changes on a global scale,
says a
new report from the National Research Council. The ability to predict
future
climate changes also has improved, but efforts to understand the impact
of such
changes on society and analyze mitigation and adaptation strategies are
still
relatively immature, added the committee that wrote the report.
Moreover, the
U.S. Climate Change Science Program (CCSP), which oversees federal
research in
this area, has made inadequate progress in supporting decision making,
studying
regional impacts, and communicating with a wider group of stakeholders.
"CCSP, an important initiative that has broadened our
knowledge of climate change, needs to package more of that knowledge
for
policymakers from the national to local level, and place more emphasis
on
understanding how people will be affected by climate change and how
they might
react," said committee chair Veerabhadran Ramanathan, Distinguished
Professor of Atmospheric and Climate Sciences at the Scripps
Institution of
Oceanography, University of California, San Diego.
Adjustments will have to be made in the balance between
basic science and applications if CCSP is to achieve its vision of
producing
information that can be used to formulate strategies for preventing,
mitigating, and adapting to the effects of climate change, the
committee
stated. It did not offer recommendations for how to sustain and improve
the
program's basic science while strengthening its applications, but this
will be
among the subjects considered in a follow-up report that the committee
expects
to issue early next year.
The report was requested by
CCSP's former director, who asked the Research Council to develop a
process for
evaluating the program and to conduct a preliminary assessment of its
progress. The committee's report is the first review of CCSP's
progress
since the program was established in 2002.
The committee developed a two-stage evaluation process. The
first stage, presented in this report, assesses the strengths and
weaknesses of
the entire program, and identifies areas where progress has not met
expectations and that should be subject to more detailed analysis
during a
second stage of evaluation. This second stage, to be completed
by CCSP
because it requires detailed budget and management information not
readily
available to the committee, would diagnose the reasons for weaknesses
and
identify strategies for improving the program.
In its review, the committee concluded that discovery
science and understanding of the overall climate system are proceeding
well. For example, knowledge of the nature and extent of
atmospheric
warming and other climate changes over the past few decades and the
influence
of human activities on these observed changes has advanced
significantly. In
addition, models that have demonstrated reasonable success in
reproducing past
climate conditions are improving confidence in future
projections. Understanding
of the water cycle has also improved, and good progress has been made
in
documenting land-use changes and estimating how carbon is distributed
around
the planet.
Uncertainties remain in other aspects of global climate
change, particularly the role of man-made aerosols in masking
greenhouse
warming, the response of hurricanes and ice sheets to global warming,
and how
climate feedbacks -- the dynamics of water vapor and clouds, for
example --
amplify or dampen the effects of greenhouse gases and other
climate-change
forces.
Overall, research into the social sciences, including human
drivers of climate change such as energy consumption, the impact on
human
systems such as political institutions and economies, and mitigation
and
adaptation options, is much less developed than research on the natural
climate
system. One reason for the slow progress is that only $25
million to $30
million of CCSP's $1.7 billion annual budget is devoted to such
research. In
addition, few social scientists are in leadership positions at the
participating federal agencies, making it difficult for CCSP to
increase
emphasis in this area or to establish links with the academic social
science
community.
Even where good scientific progress is being made, use of
new knowledge to support decision making and risk analysis is
proceeding slowly,
according to the committee. For instance, although CCSP's temperature
trends
assessment was influential in this year's report by the
Intergovernmental Panel
on Climate Change, 19 other synthesis and assessment products that were
scheduled for release by now are still in production.
One way CCSP could bridge the gap between science and
decision making would be to more closely examine the impact of climate
change
at regional and local scales, the report says. More accurate models,
better
regional observations, and the development of impact scenarios will be
required
to improve predictions of how climate change will affect smaller
spatial
scales.
Better communication from CCSP also will be critical for
confronting climate change at the local level. CCSP should
build upon the
two-way dialogue envisioned in its strategic plan by engaging state and
local
officials, nongovernmental organizations, industry, and the climate
change
technology community. This dialogue should go beyond communicating
research
results to asking what is needed from the program. The
committee
acknowledged that more resources will be needed to bolster such
relationships.
A major hurdle to CCSP progress is the program director's
lack of authority to allocate or prioritize funding across
participating
agencies, the committee said. Likewise, many of the members of
CCSP's
interagency working groups have little budgetary authority to implement
the
program's research agenda. As a result, progress tends to
occur when the
priorities of the 13 participating agencies coincide with CCSP's goals.
The committee emphasized that high-quality data from
satellites have been crucial to the advancement of climate change
science. However, a number of planned satellite missions have
been
cancelled or seriously delayed, presenting perhaps the single greatest
threat
to the future success of CCSP, according to the
committee. Without these
satellites, scientists' ability to monitor and predict climate change
will
decline, even as the urgency of doing so increases.
The
committee is holding
a workshop in Washington,
D.C.,
Oct. 15-17, to discuss future
priorities for CCSP research, which will be the focus of its follow-up
report.
##
Contact:
Contact: Jennifer Walsh
The National Academies
202-334-2813
news@nas.edu
This text derived from:
http://www8.nationalacademies.org/onpinews/newsitem.aspx?RecordID=11934
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