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How can we get past the debates between natural and anthropogenic causes of global changes, and shift our attention towards reducing and dealing with the impacts of these changes?
Posted on July 28th, 2009Categorized as Biodiversity, Climate, Earth System, Human Health, Interdisciplinary, Social Science, Social-Ecological Systems Tagged as anthropogenic factors, climate change, human dimension, natural factors
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How to minimize the natural vs anthropogenic controversy on global changes/warming issues? It seems that there is no more scientific doubts that climate changes are moving the earth system to a warmer period. It seems that the actual controversy on how much is natural and how much is human related is a worthless discussion in many senses. We have to focus on how to diminish the impacts rather than finding which is the guilty mechanism or process. Whatever the solutions, they have to be implemented in the human dimension first.
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What are the critical biodiversity levels below which ecosystems collapse, due to human interventions?
Posted on July 29th, 2009Categorized as Biodiversity, Climate, Earth System Tagged as Biodiversity, ecosystems
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Mankind will exploit ecosystems more and more to fulfill its needs. Once the use will destroy its capability to restore and will lead to an irreversible loss of both biodiversity and its production capability. The knowledge of these critical levels are a matter of life and death.
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What will be the consequences of global warming at the regional scale ?
Posted on July 25th, 2009Categorized as Climate Tagged as global warming
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This is a scale that need to be reached if we want to help society but more research is needed.
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How can we obtain non-biased probability distributions (i.e. error bars) for various aspects of Earth System model projections as climate sensitivity, sea-level rise or MOC strength?
Posted on July 29th, 2009Categorized as Climate, Earth System, Social Science Tagged as climate model
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Earth System models used for decadal and centennial projections are usually manually tuned in a high dimensional parameter space to fit current day’s climate. For physically and statistically reliable PDFs of climate quantities of interest at the end of this century we need methodical development and improvement of: automatic tuning processes, valid training data sets & methods, automatic initialisation & bottom up and top down validation attempts. Political decision methods are based on costs and benefits derived from these resulting PDFs and political action/inaction is decisive in this decade. We need to improve the quantitative aspects of the Earth System modeling enterprise substantially to justify massive welfare redistributions for the coming generations. The suggested technical development extends the questions concerning climate sensitivity and sea-level rise because it addresses general methodological difficulties in Earth System Modeling.
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How is interdecadal-to-centennial natural variability taken into account in the IPCC GCMs projections?
Posted on August 2nd, 2009Categorized as Climate Tagged as climate change, greenhouse gas, natural variability
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This low-frequency natural variability might hide or intensify the climate system response to increased greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. In fact, for the next 30 years it seems that interdecadal natural variability would play a major role in the expected changes of rainfall and temperature in many regions, for instance, in South America.
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How will different landscapes on Earth react on future climate change?
Posted on August 14th, 2009Categorized as Biodiversity, Climate, Earth System, Interdisciplinary Tagged as adaptation, climate change, climate model, landscapes
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It is important to find out about future climate change (especially by reconstructing the past), but I think it is even more important for the adaption to future changes if we know how the landscapes we are living in will react on it and how sensitive what kind of landscape is to climate change. Landscape means the natural or semi-natural area where people are living and which can be affected by direct and indirect changes in the hydrological and geomorphological system, e.g. (soil)erosion, vegetation loss or gain, desertification and so on, which all needs to be looked at in a holistic way, subordinated over and including different parts of earth system sciences considering various scales in time and space. The best way to find out about the future then is to look into the past and interpret and combine it with modeling of present landscape processes in different climate regimes. Then we might get a glance on how we have to or can adapt to different future perspectives and climate change however it will be, preserving human’s livelihoods.
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Can products and services be labeled in such a way to allow proper quantification of environmental impact at the consumer, household, and institutional levels?
Posted on July 29th, 2009Categorized as Climate, Interdisciplinary, Other, Social Science Tagged as consumption, environmental impact labels, human behavior
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Any attempt to link educational efforts, social campaigns, and even the spread of Earth Systems scientific knowledge with behavioral change capable of causing significant positive environmental consequences will require quantification of environmental impact at the individual, household, and institutional levels. However, such quantification is still very complex, coarse, and innacurate. Basic and applied reasearch, as well as standardization and policy making will be fundamental in this area. Just like WeightWatchers count calories based on product labels, so ClimateWatchers should be able to count GHG emissions. Environmental impact labels should be mandatory, but we don’t have such labels, neither the science to provide the information to print on these labels.
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Given the escalating severe impacts on the hydrological cycle, how can we effectively respond to the challenge of climate change adaptation?
Posted on August 6th, 2009Categorized as Climate Tagged as adaptation, climate change, hydrological cycle, water
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Water is the primary medium through which climate change will affect livelihoods, shape economies and alter the natural environment. Recent climate research shows that impacts on the hydrological cycle are likely to be more serious than originally thought. For this reason an assessment of how the resource is managed by humans is crucial.
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How will polar climate respond to continued global warming?
Posted on August 24th, 2009Categorized as Climate, Earth System, Interdisciplinary Tagged as climate model, global warming, ice sheets, polar regions, sea level
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Current climate models do not adequately simulate the behaviour of the climate at the poles (a) because they are based largely on tropical to mid-latitude processes, and (b) because they ignore the effects of changing ozone through time. Without improvements in polar climate models we shall be unable to provide any adequate projection of the decay of ice sheets and their contribution to sea level rise.
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Issue of resilience of our Oceans vis-a-vis climate and geosphere/biosphere changes, as all sort of pressures (natural and anthropogenic) are affecting today the Oceans Realm? How much resilient our Oceans will be for the next coming decades?
Posted on July 20th, 2009Categorized as Biodiversity, Climate, Earth System, Interdisciplinary Tagged as biosphere, climate change, climate engineering, geosphere, oceans, resilience
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Important issue as oceans constitute more than 2/3 of our planet.
Do we have good models of prediction to assist decison-makers in their planning of oceans management and governance?
