Eos: let's get the bankers and the climate modelers talking, but will the bankers be too realistic?

From Eos June 11, 2013, PAGE 215, comes a recommendation that the finance community and climate scientists work together. One wonders though, if people in the results driven financial world will soon realize that the climate models just aren’t performing, and drop such collaborations like yesterday’s bad stock tip.

Collaboration Urged for Climate Science and Finance Communities

Increased coordination and collaboration is needed between the climate science

community and the financial services industry, according to speakers at a 3–4 June

workshop held in Washington, D. C., by the American Meteorological Society (AMS).

The AMS workshop brought together business and financial leaders and climate scientists.

The financial industry needs climate data for a variety of predictions, but there has

been little collaboration between the industry and the climate science community, speakers said.

In a briefing summarizing the conference outcomes, Gary Geernaert, director of the

Department of Energy’s Climate and Environmental Sciences Division, pointed to the variety of climate data needs for different stakeholders. For example, catastrophic event

risk managers may need short- term predictions of extreme weather events, while

reinsurance managers need climate predictions on longer- term time scales. He said that

in some cases, currently available climate change information does not meet the needs

of these stakeholders. In particular, climate models often do not adequately represent the

likelihood of the most extreme events or take into account multistressor events that happen when different weather extremes occur at the same time.

…

Climate modelers and financial decision makers are different in many ways and do not

often interact, explained Tom Bogdan, president of the University Corporation for

Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo. However, “uncertainty, risk, change—these

are not concepts that are alien to financial decision makers,” he said. Variability in the

Earth system, from extreme events to changes in temperature to air quality issues, brings

uncertainty, risk, and change to the financial landscape, he noted. Building relationships

between financial decision makers and climate scientists is key, Bogdan said,

because “you can’t adapt to climate change by googling climate change.”

Full essay here, thanks to Dr. Leif Svalgaard.