Researchers advocate for climate adaptation science
CORVALLIS, Ore. – An international team of researchers says in a new paper that climate science needs to advance to a new realm – more practical applications for dealing with the myriad impacts of climate variability.
The scientific capability already exists as does much of the organizational structure, they say, to begin responding to emerging climate-related issues ranging from declining snowpack, to severe storms, to sea level rise. What is missing is better engagement between the scientific community and the stakeholders they are seeking to inform.
Their paper is being published on Friday in the Policy Forum section of the journal Science.
“Adaptation is required in virtually all sectors of the economy and regions of the globe,” they wrote. “However, without the appropriate science delivered in a decision-relevant context, it will become increasingly difficult – if not impossible – to prepare adequately.”
Philip Mote, an Oregon State University climate scientist and co-author on the paper, said climate adaptation science involves trans-disciplinary research to understand the challenges and opportunities of climate change – and how best to respond to them.
“What we need is more visibility to gain more inclusiveness – to bring into play the private sector, resource managers, universities and a host of decision-makers and other stakeholders,” said Mote, who directs the Oregon Climate Change Research Institute at Oregon State. “The stakeholders need to know our scientific capabilities, and we need to better understand their priorities and decision-making processes.”
Oregon State is among the national leaders in climate adaptation science. In addition to the Oregon Climate Change Research Institute, the university has two regional climate centers – one established by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to work with municipalities, utilities, emergency management organizations and state and federal agencies; the other by the Department of the Interior to work primarily with federal and state agencies, and non-governmental organizations.
Mote, who is involved with all three centers, said work with stakeholders is gaining traction, but the gap that exists between scientists and decision-makers is still too large.
“The centers here and elsewhere around the country are driven by stakeholder demands, but that needs to reach deeper into the research enterprise,” Mote said. “We’re working with some water districts, forest managers and community leaders on a variety of issues, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg.”
Richard Moss, a senior scientist with the U.S. Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, said the Science article grew out of a NASA-funded workshop held in 2012 at the Aspen Global Change Institute in Colorado, which focused on how to improve support for decision-making in the face of a changing climate.
“Traditionally, we think that what society needs is better predictions,” said Moss, who was lead author on the Science article. “But at this workshop, all of us – climate and social scientists alike – recognized the need to consider how decisions get implemented and that climate is only one of many factors that will determine how people will adapt.”
OSU’s Mote said examples abound of issues that need the marriage of stakeholders and climate scientists. Changing snowmelt runoff is creating concerns for late-season urban water supplies, irrigation for agriculture, and migration of fish. An increasing number of plant and animal species are becoming stressed by climate change, including the white bark pine and the sage grouse. Rising sea levels and more intense storms threaten the infrastructure of coastal communities, which need to examine water and sewer systems, as well as placement of hospitals, schools and nursing homes.
Mote, Moss and their colleagues outline a comprehensive approach to research in the social, physical, environmental, engineering and other sciences. Among their recommendations for improvement:
- Understand decision processes and knowledge requirements;
- Identify vulnerabilities to climate change;
- Improve foresight about exposure to climate hazards and other stressors;
- Broaden the range of adaptation options and promote learning;
- Provide examples of adaptation science in application;
- Develop measures to establish adaptation science.
One such measure could be the development of a national institution of climate preparedness in the United States comprised of centers for adaptation science aimed at priority sectors.
“More broadly,” the authors wrote in Science, “support for sustained, use-inspired, fundamental research on adaptation needs to be increased at research agencies. A particular challenge is to develop effective approaches to learn from adaptation practice as well as published research. Universities could provide support for sustained, trans-disciplinary interactions. Progress will require making a virtue of demonstrating tangible benefits for society by connecting research and applications.”
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What a painful read.
“What we need is more visibility to gain more inclusiveness – to bring into play the private sector, resource managers, universities and a host of decision-makers and other stakeholders,” said Mote, who directs the Oregon Climate Change Research Institute at Oregon State. “The stakeholders need to know our scientific capabilities, and we need to better understand their priorities and decision-making processes.”
How the hell is any of that going to help? It’s going to be like Bureaucratic Whack-a-Mole. Model predictions continually changing, while cranially-challenged lawyers wallow in a cesspool of weepy alarmist scientific bamboozlement.
Just wait until some thing is apparently happening, like catastrophic sea level rise, and move uphill, sillies.
What a load of jargonised rubbish.
By all means maintain and improve the observation of climate and learn – and stop trying to build a mega bureaucracy where none is justified. This just more of the same “jobs for the boys” IPCC styled carp
To paraphrase Monty Python…these guys have a PhD in ‘The Bleedin’ Obvious.’
I think academia should purge people who make $hit up or just use high falutin’ jargon to expound upon the bleedin’ obvious.
Huh. Made a typo in my email and WordPress threw away my comment. This silly paper doesn’t warrant retyping it all.
Oregon State certainly is in ‘ Corn Valley ‘ and this waste of paper / electrons deserves only the bit bucket. Save it for April 1st !
So they advocate more of the same green graft government corruption in service of the lie, even as the world comes to understand it to be a lie.
The very definition of moron.
1. “Understand decision processes and knowledge requirements;”
A. A working thermometer.
2. “Identify vulnerabilities to climate change;”
A. People not smart enough to get out of the rain.
3. “Improve foresight about exposure to climate hazards and other stressors;”
A. More thermometers.
4. “Broaden the range of adaptation options and promote learning;”
A. Umbrellas might work to stay out of the rain.
5. “Provide examples of adaptation science in application;”
A. Roofs keep people out of the rain.
6. “Develop measures to establish adaptation science.”
A. We’ve never read any books by Charles Darwin.
Many of the problems they worry about are much easier to overcome when they don’t exist in the first place. #justsendmoney.
Unbelievable arrogance. And there is likely to be more of this. Know-nothings sensing that the game might be up, so are sliding sideways, without having the slightest notion that others have been working on resilience to climate hazards for decades. Hazards that arise from climate sameness, not climate change. Stuff that has happened before and will happen again.
These people ARE the “other stressors”. They make the real work more difficult to do.
Did they just say we should be ready for a big time cooling when they said climate chage?
Is this the start of the admission that everything they said in the past was garbage?
Thanks
JK
Ahhh… but we also have to eliminate “carbon” and without “carbon,” there is no adaptation. Oh wait… windmills will save us.
This is the golden age of information. So how in the heck did our dumba$$ ancestors in untold past generations manage to survive an ever-changing climate such that we are here today? The truth of the matter is that we have been so successful in adapting to climate – central heating, central air, only hours to travel to a place with climate to our liking – that few people have the basic knowledge of weather and climate that most farmers have had going back untold generations. Our forefathers would have killed for our doppler radar and satellite images. Now we have the technology to “see it coming” but no one seems to have the sense that god gave a goat to get out of the way./rant
This process would no doubt result in much more fuel reduction on the forest floor and the removal of windmills that are destroying untold thousands of birds, to name but two benefits. Who the said stakeholders and how do i become one?
I wonder how much this conference cost us? If NASA is short of funding, I know one area they can save money. When did we mutate from homo sapiens to homo incapaces? My guess is that we still retain the ability to adapt to almost anything, particularly slow moving events like a changing climate. It’s probably in our genes.
I’m also getting tired of the “path forward” cliche, sorta reminds me of the old Lenin posters.
Not a single climate model can make a reliable regional forecast beyonda few days and these guys want to give infrastructure advice?
Can anyone name a place where the climate has changed enough in the last 30 years to require any “adaptation”.
There are areas which have always had problems (built on a delta, coastline subsiding or eroding, periodic hurricanes, alternating drought and rainfall cycles, desert), but these conditions have not changed from what they were 100 or 200 years ago.
The only change we can really point to is that vegetation is growing better due to the increased CO2.
Somewhat off topic but pure alarmism all over again
I was just looking at the english version of the german mag, “Spiegel on line”.
The lead article tonight [ eastern Australian time zone ] was “A Brighter, Dimmer Future: Germany’s Saviors of the Night” which deals with the problem of light pollution from a German astronomers point of view .
Then the Spiegel article goes on to quote “scientists”
[quote;]”
The assembled ecologists, entomologists, physicians, lighting designers, astronomers and lawyers agreed that since inventors like Thomas Edison unleashed the power of the lightbulb more than 130 years ago, life on the planet has been plunged into a large-scale experiment that becomes more volatile every day. Its outcome is uncertain. For millions of years, darkness was part of life. And now, suddenly, darkness is absent.
&
The adverse effects of all of this nighttime lighting are all too apparent. Myriads of insects die each year on street lamps or in the webs of the unnaturally large numbers of spiders that now live on street lamps. This reduces the number of insects available to eat for animals much higher on the food chain. Birds, for their part, become confused in the light cloud and collide with brightly lit high-rise buildings. Some bats avoid the light and flee to darker realms, while many moths are no longer reproducing sufficiently in brightly lit areas. “Biodiversity is declining in many illuminated regions,” says Hölker.
[ end]
More of the same sickening wailing , weeping and gnashing of teeth as the “woe, woe, we are rooned all over again” follows in the Spiegel article.
During my 75 years I have supported science and because of my interest in science, have served as a layman on a number of committees and groupings where science was the reason for their existence.
But maybe looking back and looking at the path that modern science is now taking I may have just wasted half a lifetime on promoting and facilitating science.
.
I am utterly fed up to the back teeth with constant wailing and predictions of new horrors about to descend on mankind unless we mend our ways and follow the dictates of “those who know and are EXPERTS and SCIENTISTS’
Frankly after the last few months of blatant alarmism ad nauseum without any evidence at all being presented on any number of supposed scientifically [ sarc ] predicted horror events about to overtake mankind sometime in the immediate future, I am totally fed up to the back teeth with scientists and their sheer idiocy in the way they seem so desperate to destroy the image of science as an endeavor that is totally unique and has been of immense benefit to mankind, lifting our species up from a near animal existence to a globally wide civilisation.
The rapidly progressing destruction by scientists themselves of science as a vision proceeds apace and the vision that science will be guide and a beacon that will lead mankind onto an even better future is fast vanishing in a morass of sickening self pity and hand wringing by the scientific fraternity
Instead we see a selfish, self important, self promoting, whingeing, whining cabal of hand wringers who go by the name of scientists and who it seems can no longer provide any sort of uplifting vision,for mankind.
The only vision we, the public see today from science is one that promotes multitudinous visions of numerous deadly Hades in mankind’s future and the promises of the shades of the Hells to come.
Science and scientists are becoming the Charons of modern times, salivating while waiting to ferry the souls of the dead across the Styx to the Hells on the other side and collecting their coins of payment for the deed.
End of rant/
After reading the article, I wanted to comment, but I’ve got nothing to add; you’ve all managed to say everything that needs saying. If only the fools in Oregon could acknowledge they’re similarly late to the party.
I read the book 1984 as part of my education in to becoming an engineer. It was a compulsory read and an analysis, for the English literature part of becoming an engineer. That was fifty years ago.
These people have taken a novel and made it a mantra, a new way,a progressive way, a way of using newspeak where war is peace, warming is cooling,children of today have only their parents to educate them in truth. In america the democrates call themselves liberals and progressives both terms are the reverse of truth, such as thank big brother for the increase in the chocolate ration.
This article is just newspeak and total BS, adaption is a natural trait of all animals including us, I do hope this was freebie thing and no body actually paid these people for this cr#p.
But at this workshop, all of us – climate and social scientists alike – recognized the need to consider how decisions get implemented and that climate is only one of many factors that will determine how people will adapt.
Oh dear! An unholy marriage of climate scientists and social scientists. More Lew paper on the way.
In some respects in seems quite natural that social scientists and climate scientists should get together. They need to thrash out whether any of them do ‘science’ at all. Perhaps they should change their respective subjects to ‘social studies’ and ‘climate studies’; the better to interact with ‘media studies’ graduates with whom they have a close relationship.
True, it is an interesting challenge as to how to respond to our boring climate. We might just die of boredom, and that would be bad (I think). But, if we make stuff up, like “the declining snowpack”, and throw in things that have always occurred like severe storms pretending they are somehow more severe or more frequent, and then, for good measure throw in the “sea level rise” bogeyman, as if that, too hasn’t been happening all along, perhaps people will be scared enough not to notice the complete lack of actual science.
Because it would be really bad if these “climate researchers” were to be out of a job.
Worry not, Climate Adaptation Science, millions of dollars are being sent your way as we speak. Kudos to you for letting us know how important (and needy) you are.
The adage “adapt or die” is one my grandmother taught me a half century ago. The concept probably originated with Alfred Russell Wallace, who has been deceased for 100 years. Astute of the researchers to notice this.
It is a summary of the elegant mechanism behind the Law of Natural Selection and by extension the Theory of Evolution. Anybody who cannot retreat from a sea level rise of 20 cm/century deserves to die, and anybody who believes such as sea level rise is a threat to any life form is already brain dead.
Shorter Mr. Mote:
“You ignorant skeptics have exposed our scientific lies, but we can still implement the full Green Agenda by going over your heads to the career plutocrats hidden in the government. So There.”
“begin responding to emerging climate-related issues ranging from declining snowpack, to severe storms, to sea level rise”
Of course, these problems are not happening, which can only mean that they are rebranding “climate change,” aka global warming, as “climate variability.
We have always had to deal with all of the above since even before 1850. The Medieval Warm period had declining snowpack, severe storms were rampant during the Little Ice Age and sea levels have been rising since the end of the last de-glaciation. What the heck does any of the above have to do with co2?