What changes in policies (global to local) and human behavior will most strongly reduce human pressures on the planet’s life support systems, and how can the scientific community influence their implementation?

Humanity has perhaps a couple of decades to radically reshape the relationship between society and the biosphere. This requires research on human perceptions and motivations as well as communications between scientists and society. Very little global change research is focused on these critical issues which will determine whether more basic research on global change will have any impact at all.

There are large disconnects between the world of scientific (including social-scientific) experts and the general public on subjects such as risk, vulnerability, and socio-ecological change. This presents challenges to generating the political change we need for embarking on more sustainable development pathways. In what ways does this disconnect affect the creation of appropriate policy, and how do we deal with it?

The public is growing increasingly distrustful of politicians and of what academic Tim Mitchell calls “the rule of experts.” For real, transformative changes, we need mass buy-in and political pressure. What is our responsibility, as academics, in terms of making our research accessible, relevant and usable by the public? How do we bridge this gap?

How can we rapidly develop carbon negative energy systems and deploy them globally?

Sub-questions: What options for carbon negativity are there? What are the thermodynamic limitations on the various carbon negative alternatives? How can we break the linkage of large grants going to unproductive and ineffective entities? How can small farmers become the engine for carbon negativity that Sir James Lovelock suggests they must? Are there alternatives to the current IPO model for this kind of development cycle? What are the real time constraints for effective activity in the carbon negative arena? How can we explain these constraints to the general public?

Sir James Lovelock has identified the apparent only real carbon negative energy opportunity – processing organic residues into stable biochar and using that char as a soil enhancement near where the residues occur globally and enabling small farmers to profit from this activity. He has not connected this to distributed energy generation and there are many factors that would benefit from both rapid documentation and codification for global use. The recent changes in Arctic thermal profiles raise serious questions about how long we really have to react. There is no question that lowering the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere can only be accomplished with either massive reduction of emissions for an extended period so that normal carbon negative processes can catch up with the past emissions or we will have to find ways of accelerating the removal of CO2 with thermodynamically beneficial systems. What alternatives do we really have?

At the same time we need to also put in place a series of practices that will be stable over the long haul – ie: they must become sustainable. It appears that Sir James has hit on a realistic possibility to do many of these things at once, and he has seen that the normal corporate practice of enriching a few by doing things that we all should be doing for ourselves is no longer a tenable solution. How do we get to real sustainable practices in time to do things right?

What would life in a warmer and ocean-acidified world be like, and how easy will it be to adapt?

Only when we can communicate a scientifically defensible but more detailed picture of what a higher-CO2 world would be like to live in, can the average person really decide how hard we should work to avoid it. We often assume that we will adapt, but without quantitatively examining whether anticipated adaptations will work, how they will interact with each other, and how they will affect human well-being. This requires an interdisciplinary push of the sciences beyond their comfort zones, aggressive use of integrated assessment and adaptation models, some storyteller’s imagination as to possible future scenarios where aspects of life that we now take for granted might no longer hold, and examination of how required adjustments would affect people mentally and physically.

What are the most effective ways climate change and natural scientists can engage with politicians and natural resource managers to facilitate implementation of more ecosystem-based management approaches to natural resource use?

The basic processes of climate change are reasonably well understood; what is needed are appropriate methods of communication to decision-makers about the socio-economic and biophysical impacts of climate change. Information on impacts needs to be communicated in such a way that policians and resource managers can see why it will be their interests to act on this information sooner rather than later.

Obstacles? Short timeframe based on electoral cycles in many developed countries hinders long-term strategic view needed for more sustainable natural resource use policies.

How should climate models evolve in order to provide sound information for impact assessment and scenario development?

It is often pointed out that IPCC AR4 put an end to the debate on “reality” of global change. The role of climate models will accordingly be changed. A possible direction is to utilize model results as bases for impact assessment for global change and in turn scenario development. What are the deficits and possible improvements of current climate models when applied for impact assessments? Communications among different disciplines are requited to answer this question.

How do we keep all of this research relevant to society?

Earth System Science has something of an identity crisis – the general public, and certainly many scientists don’t know what it’s about while we think it’s at the basis of our future existence on this planet. Do we, the research community, have spokes-people focusing on communication? How can individuals improve – or create – a commonly understood reputation for this field? Without this reputation we will struggle to find funding, students, jobs.