Coping with climate change

Email: Eugene Russo - erusso@the-scientist.com
News from The Scientist 2002, 3(1):20021209-06     doi:10.1186/20021209-06

Published 9 December 2002

WASHINGTON, DC — The Bush administration, in conjunction with thirteen sponsoring federal agencies, last Thursday completed a three-day workshop seeking to set a new agenda for research on climate change. Though hampered by an early season snowstorm on its final day, the meeting was host to nearly 1300 climate scientists, technologists and stakeholders.

Faced with criticism for their environmental policy, administration officials and policy advisors emphasized the openness of the proceedings. Transparency was an "essential feature" of the meeting, said James R. Mahoney, assistant secretary of Commerce for Oceans and Atmosphere and director of the US Climate Change Science Program. "The only way we could progress was to put it all on the table," he said.

The proceedings focused on revisions and improvements to a draft version of a new strategic plan for US-sponsored climate change research. Mahoney told participants that the draft plan was prepared with an emphasis on the questions to be resolved in order to "develop effective public decisions about climate change."

Mahoney resisted the idea of the workshop as a "rubber stamp," and the notion that it was part of a plan by the administration to delay dealing with global climate change. "We can't talk about implementation unless we do what we're doing here," Mahoney told reporters. "It's been years since there's been this kind of vetting of what we're really studying."

The President has called for 10 years of research and voluntary global warming reduction measures before any strict regulations are put in place. According to Mahoney, this should not be considered a moratorium; the administration could conceivably change its "goals and tactics." Bush has thus far rejected the Kyoto Protocol, which has been accepted by most other industrialized countries. It requires a reduction in greenhouse-gas emissions by 2012 to levels below those measured in 1990.

"We know the surface temperature of the Earth is rising, and we know that the changes are [partly] due to humans," Environmental Protection Agency administrator Christine Todd-Whitman told a workshop audience of scientists, stakeholders and media. "But we can't rule out changes due to natural variability. We need to know which human activities are causing the greatest climate change."

The US Global Change Research Program was launched as a series of research initiatives in 1987 and signed into law in 1990. To date, more than $20 billion of research funding has supported the USGCRP. Much of the discussion at the recent meeting was based on a 2001 National Research Council report commissioned by the Bush administration.

Mahoney told reporters that one major challenge would be moving much of the funded science toward "policy-related" research while not neglecting the need for basic research on climate change. The 24-session workshop included discussions of "climate variability and change," "interactions between data, observations, and modeling," and "human contributions and responses to climate change."

Aims endorsed at the workshop included improved protocols for global measurements, data management and trend analysis, evaluation of technologies for mitigation of warming effects, and the monitoring consequences of global change for ecosystems.

A session titled "ecosystem interactions," for example, stressed the need for more emphasis in the draft report on rates of climate change, more explicit attention to species changes, and a better integration of report chapters on ecosystems with chapters on the effects of human contributions to climate change.


Feedback from the workshop, along with additional written and online comments, will be accepted until January 13, 2003. The final version of the strategic plan, which will guide the federal research program during the next several years, is scheduled to be released in April of 2003.



References

1.  [http://www.climatescience.gov/events/workshop2002/default.htm]
  US Climate Change Science Program: Planning Workshop, December 3–5, 2002
Return to citation in text: [1]
 
2.  [http://www.climatescience.gov/]
  US Climate Change Science Program
Return to citation in text: [1]
 
3.  [http://www.epa.gov/]
  Environmental Protection Agency
Return to citation in text: [1]
 
4.  [http://www.usgcrp.gov/]
  US Global Change Research Program
Return to citation in text: [1]
 
5.  [http://www4.nas.edu/onpi/webextra.nsf/web/climate?OpenDocument]
  National Research Council June 2001 report
Return to citation in text: [1]
 


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Independent report on global heating on a commission basis defies of experts to deny a hypothesis.
by Rafael Lomeᅢᄆa Varo

[Comment posted 2007-03-15 15:58:06]
[Translation made by automated means in Google]
[To Him request excuses to possible errors]

The only thing that we know is that nobody knows for sure towards where the climate goes, but please, we do not commit a folly. It is necessary to be blind not to see the harmful interference of the man in the global warming, for that reason, we continue investigating and working to improve, although he is little, perhaps insufficient.

But sometimes I think that saddest of all this, it is that after many months investigating by my account the phenomenon from a new perspective, nobody could imagine that the difficult thing would not be to discover a possible "agent direct cause" of the complex phenomena of the climatic change and the ACCELERATED global heating, but be able the most mini mediatic cover to accede, at least, to a revision of my hypothesis on the part of a commission of several experts. The one of the heating already seems a question difficult to justify, for example, in Spain, the brown bear no longer hiberna.

The one of the antropogᅢᄅnico factor seems that also it begins to signal of "consensus" in accordance with little published on 4ᅡᄎ report that the IPCC will make public at the end of this year (2007). Nevertheless, it is paradoxical which certain variables directly involved like are the excess of forest fires on global scale (according to the few estimations to that I could have had access, between 30 and 55 million hectares of forest (30 mill. hectᅢᄀ. = 300 thousands Km2 = complete surface Italy) they are losing every year in the occasion of forest fires), follow forgotten in darkroom the trastero of the investigations.

If they want to see the consequences of these facts and some simple calculations on the matter, can be documented in my personal Web:
+ LINK

Also I inform to them that I have been months trying that some means publish the information, but is impossible. Good, in case to some it interests to him, this is my news, in primicia, to which the means insist on ignoring.

TO TITLE: Independent report on global heating on a commission basis defies of experts to deny a hypothesis.

A recent independent report on climatic change and global heating elaborated by a nontie investigator absolutely with no corporative nor governmental being, tries to warn the scientific group that the measures adapted in this sense when ignoring itself are not being taken factors that can be determining on the phenomenon. The report specially points at the excess of forest fires like direct coagent cause of the effect conservatory and its possible impact in the increase of extreme meteorological phenomena at global level. Although the author of this report is not excluding with any of the present lines of investigation as well as the policies of reduction of antropogᅢᄅnicas gas emissions conservatories, the same one alleges with rotundidad the alarming indifference that apparently are being granted to the factor of the forest fires and the possible repercussions that these can be already affecting in the phenomenon of the climatic change, in addition to the urgent necessity of cocienciaciᅢᄈn on the matter on the part of all the social agents, fundamentally average of diffusion and governmental beings. Also, the document analyzes the real possibilities to fight the phenomenon of the global heating through the control, prevention and partial eradication of forest fires on global scale. The access to the complete report as well as other documents and calculations of interest for the reader can be in:

+ LINK (Report - spanish)
+ LINK (simulator and other book calculations for Microsoft Excel - spanish)

"... NOTE: It would be thankful to them that they did not publish the complete report, but the news that them envio, since in such case would have to authorize to them specifically in writing.

Rafael Lomeᅢᄆa (Spain) - rlv@inicia.es
LINK






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