Of course, very few of us really claim to know the future with much certainty, and climate science has none of the pretensions or divine endorsement associated with those who make dramatic predictions. From a policy perspective, prognostication is fraught with much risk. How do you make important, costly decisions when you are unsure what the future will be like? Of course, uncertainty about the future is nothing new, and most policy can best be described as risk avoidance and minimization: how can we balance the probability of certain events with the costs of addressing them? But climate change puts a powerful new twist on the situation. Climate is important to much of what we do as a species, and we are very sure that the climate is rapidly changing. But knowing exactly how the climate is changing in a particular place by a particular time is extremely difficult — and arguably impossible. The most that scientists (such as those at the IPCC) are willing to endorse is that to provide a range of scenarios or a set of probabilities around one scenario. Read More...

Tags: modeling, synergies, policy

A few years ago, the term “synergistic” was all the rage for National Science Foundation grant proposals and probably elsewhere in scientific funding venues. The term still seems to rage across the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC; the U.N. body that focuses on “global warming” ). Synergistic basically means that the interaction between two of more forces is different than simply adding the forces together. In the western portions of North America, for instance, annual precipitation is becoming more variable (particularly with more droughts and higher rates of evaporation, resulting in drier and more frequently dry periods). Although fire is a natural part of the landscape in the region, the interaction of more fire and a drier climate is likely to transform the region as fires become more frequent and more intense. That’s a synergistic interaction. Read More...

Tags: china, synergies