ENVIRONMENT | Protecting our natural resources
27 January 2009
Obama Makes Climate Change a National Priority
U.S. technical agencies prepare to help regions understand local effects
This is the first article in a series about steps to address the effects of climate change at regional and local levels.
Washington — Climate change is a planetary process, but its effects — sea level rise, shrinking glaciers, changes in plant and animal distribution, early-blooming trees, permafrost thaws — are regional and local.
Some of the effects are already occurring, and the newly installed Obama administration, in power for just more than a week, is moving fast to put the United States in a leadership position to work with nations of the world and meet the challenges of climate change and energy security.
On January 26, President Obama signed two related presidential memorandums. In what he called “a down payment on a broader and sustained effort to reduce our dependence on foreign oil,” Obama directed the Department of Transportation to establish higher fuel efficiency standards for carmakers’ 2011 model year.
The second memo directed the Environmental Protection Agency to reconsider a petition by California to set more stringent limits for greenhouse gas emissions from motor vehicles than those set by the federal government. (See “Obama Sets Bold New Principles for U.S. Energy, Climate Policies.”)
SPECIAL ENVOY FOR CLIMATE CHANGE
On the same day, at the U.S. State Department, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton introduced Todd Stern as the nation’s new special envoy for climate change.
“With the appointment today of a special envoy,” Clinton said, “we are sending an unequivocal message that the United States will be energetic, focused, strategic and serious about addressing global climate change and the corollary issue of clean energy.”
Stern will serve as a principal adviser on international climate policy and strategy and as the administration’s chief climate negotiator. He will lead U.S. efforts in U.N. negotiations and will be a lead participant in developing climate and clean energy policy.
“Containing climate change will require nothing less than transforming the global economy from a high-carbon [dioxide] to a low-carbon energy base,” said Stern, who in the 1990s coordinated the Clinton administration’s climate change efforts and was senior White House representative at U.N. climate negotiations in Kyoto, Japan, and Buenos Aires, Argentina.
“President Obama and Secretary Clinton have left no doubt,” he said, “that a new day is dawning in the U.S. approach to climate change and clean energy.”
SCALING DOWN TO THE LOCAL LEVEL
Climate change often is described as an event that will bring catastrophe to Earth’s inhabitants in the distant future.
But every nation’s farmers, coastal dwellers, emergency planners and government officials already have experienced the bleeding edge of changing climate — rising air and sea-surface temperatures, shrinking arctic ice, lower crop yields, dwindling forests, intense hurricanes and unrelenting droughts.
There is no shortage of evidence that the planet faces a climate crisis, but there is a severe shortage of one thing that will help villages, towns, cities and regions protect themselves and their ecosystems against the long-term effects of a climate in flux: information.
“Our understanding [of climate change] has primarily been at the global level,” William Brennan, former administrator of the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), told America.gov. “That’s where we can see the signal.”
Much more work needs to be done, he said, “to scale that down to the regional and ultimately to the local level. That’s where we need the facilities of something like a National Climate Service, not only to provide information, but to receive data and turn it into information.”
NATIONAL CLIMATE SERVICE
Weather is the day-to-day state of the atmosphere and its short-term (minutes to weeks) variation, according to the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center. Climate is statistical weather information that describes weather variation at a given place averaged over a longer period, usually 30 years.
NOAA’s National Weather Service provides weather, hydrologic and climate forecasts and warnings for the United States, its territories and ocean areas. Weather Service data and products form a national information database and infrastructure that is available to other governmental agencies, the private sector, the public and the global community.
NOAA also has an operational mandate to monitor and predict climate, Chet Koblinsky, director of NOAA’s Climate Program Office, told America.gov.
With NOAA in the lead, a proposed climate service partnership would include federal agencies like NASA, the U.S. Geological Survey, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the U.S. Forest Service and many others.
NOAA also would collaborate with academic and private organizations.
“We don’t have all the capability,” Koblinsky said. “The best climate service will be one that draws on the full capabilities of the nation.”
NOAA and its partners are discussing the potential capabilities and products of such a new service.
What actions should President Obama take to address climate change? Comment on America.gov’s blog.
