What we need to know about climate change

By Iain Coleman

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From the Sinclair C5 to the Segway, technological history is littered with the wrecks of products, created with great effort and ingenuity, that were simply not what the consumer needed. Are climate change predictions doomed to the same fate? Are the models failing to give policymakers and planners the information they need to cope with the effects of global warming? This concern led Andrew Kerr to run the e-Science Institute’s (eSI) research theme on Communicating the e-Science of Climate Change.

A survey of public sector organisations in 2008 found that many of them didn’t use the then-current scenarios of climate change in their planning, because the information presented in them simply wasn’t useful for practical purposes. Will the 2009 UK climate projections (UKCP09) be any more widely used? That depends on whether modellers produce what policymakers require. The UKCP09 Scottish User Community Meeting, held on 1 February 2010 at the eSI, sought to create a group of users that can work with climate modellers to bridge this gap in communication. The participants came from disparate fields, from forestry to heritage, representing the wide range of organisations that need to develop robust policies to cope with climate change.

One of the main user requirements is the ability to identify the threshold at which a particular harm occurs, and then calculate the risk of that threshold being reached. It’s all very well determining that a certain increase in river flow will lead to floods in a particular area, but how exactly does that relate to the rainfall predictions from a climate model? The more modelling that is involved, the more steps required beyond basic climate prediction, the harder it is to answer such questions with any great reliability.

Some of this work is simply numerically intensive. In forestry, for example, trees being planted now will last for thirty to fifty years. Understanding the weather risks and climate vulnerabilities of different types of trees in different types of location means crunching a lot of data, some of which is quite tricky to work with.

The problem is even more complex in other fields. Fully understanding how climate change will affect our natural heritage would mean predicting the impact on every single species. This is clearly impracticable, but even just focusing on a few key species isn’t as simple as it sounds. A wide range of species in Scotland are dependent on heather, for example, and understanding how climate change will affect heather means getting to grips with physical geology.

The user community in Scotland can help by integrating disparate knowledge, cutting across organisational and disciplinary boundaries, and creating case studies and briefing notes in key areas. With limited resources, it is not feasible to model every possible impact of climate change – which makes it even more important to share information and avoid needless duplication of effort.

If this programme is successful, it should lead to better decision making, and increased engagement in climate change planning, by organisations in Scotland. Over the next six to twelve months, Kerr and his colleagues will track whether greater resilience is being built in Scotland, and whether organisations are getting better at understanding the risks of climate change. The community-building work of this meeting is just the start – the real test will be to see whether interest is transformed into action.

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