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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Messed up my blockquotes. 8-(
What problem? What threat? Is it man-made climate change you are talking about? Where is the beef?
Mitigation against what? Adaptation is a no brainer, it has always been done or people move to better ground. Why do we need a paper to state the bloody obvious? Why do we need a paper to tell us something we don’t need to be told. As for the future guessing gate, that’s for the suckers at the IPCC who have proved themselves to be as useful as used toilet paper.
Grrrrr.
“……As for the future guessing game, that’s for the suckers…………”
Adaptation has always been the only answer: http://climal.com/Environmental-Adaptation-Through-Technology.php
I saw a great program (on the BBC no less) called “Don’t Panic” presented by Hans Rosling, the chap with the great Gapminder graphics. In it, he points out that thanks to education, particularly of young girls and women, the number of 0-15 year olds is going to stabilise at 2 billion in about ten years time. The average number of children per woman in Asia, America (North and South) and Europe now stands at 2.2. Only in Africa is it higher at about 4.
As a result, the world’s population will stabilise at 11billion by 2090, mostly because everybody can be expected to live longer, with about 1BN in Europe, 1BN in the Americas, 5BN in Asia, and 4BN in Africa. Of course, towards the end there was the usual sop to our CO2 footprint, but it was said in the context of allowing Asians and Africans to emit more in order to fuel their prosperity, so I gave him a pass on that. This is manageable.
What this also means is that suppose the disasterbaters’ every wish came through and all the ice melted, great tracts of Canada and Russia, as well as Greenland and Antarctica, would become habitable and arable. But suppose it happens the other way, a great global cooling. It’s my belief that the hot deserts of the world currently would then become habitable and arable, so other than having to migrate according to the new regime, we should still be able to live and have pretty much the lifestyle we have now, because through technological advancement, we will all be using less resources for the same outcome.
The sad fact is, that the people writing this tosh would be unemployed (and unemployable) otherwise, and that to me is going to be one of our greatest challenges going forward. How do we divvy up the productive work such that everybody gets a chance to do some and pay their way. Especially here in the West more people are employed now to slow down technological advance (bureaucrats, “scientists”), than to speed it up or enhance it (engineers). As a result, we in the West are at a point where the best we can hope for is to keep the standard of living that we have, while Asia, and possibly South America, race off ahead of us.
This is an example of a fundamental misunderstanding of “adaptation.” Darwinian “adaptation” is the effect (result) of natural variations becoming advantageous in a changed environment. The “adaptors” play no active role in the process.
Contemporary “adaptation” is intentional modification (by the “adaptor”) to cope with a changed environment.
Do the authors recognize the difference?
Like I said future generations will be better equipped to deal with climate changes and weather disasters. Where are those wonderful Malthusians now? The population worry will soon be over.
It’s worse than we thought!
@ROM – Rant well said, but the usual problem is that the mollusks aren’t listening.
@Cornelius Gotchberg – Yeah, and they think Marie Antoinette Obama is worthy? How sad.
I’m inclined to demand a refund of my taxpayer dollars that paid for this disingenuous waste of time. The authors betray their statism in spades – which is what the whole CAGW scare is all about to begin with. Tax, regulate, bureaucratize!
One hopes that the exposure of der Fuehrer’s lying about Fuehrerabuse ( = Obamacare) may also impair his creditability with respect to his climate change agenda. That’s just as much a lie as his promise that “You can eekp yout plan, PERIOD!”
“keep your plan” – my lousy typing again, but perhaps Freudian since it would well describe the level of learning behind CAGW.
People just won’t be able to cope. It’s worse than we thought! For every story of doom and gloom there is a little reality. Things are bad, but not as bad as the media and Warmists would like us to believe. Human progress continues around the world.
Professor Drapela should add a civil rights violation to his complaint for wrongful termination. OSU has certainly trampled his right to free speech.
Roy Innis, Chairman of the Congress of Racial Equality, states in his new book Energy Keepers, Energy Killers: The New Civil Rights Battle, that affordable energy should be regarded as a basic human right. it would certainly appear to be at least on a par with any posited right to healthcare. And der Fuehrer is definitely on the wrong side of this battle (consistent of course with his utter disregard of constitutional rights and civil liberties in everything else he does).
An attempt to co-opt adaptation into mitigation of predicted problems, which currently do not exist (severe weather, etc.) , and show no signs of developing.
@Chad Wozniak;
RE: OSU & Drapela;
“They” went after his grown, qualified children!!
How F****D UP is that?
‘Mann are from Venus.’
Wrong planet I think 🙂
The obvious thing is that said scientists believe the hiatus can’t last and that the IPCC is right that AGW will continue on apace. Just as soon as they find the missing heat.
@Cornelius Gotchberg –
Wow, it gets worse! What are they going to do? There has to be a cause in here somewhere for filing criminal charges against those reptiles at OSU.
The president’s solution to any problem is to declare his dismay, promise the folks who generated it will be held accountable, and wait ’til it blows over.
It would appear that the warmists, with their tax based government stooges, have decided to stop trying to deal with climate projections from a technical standpoint and simply assume all their worries are justly founded. Now they can cap and trade, build sea walls, and burn food for fuel without any argument to deal with
Mote is a nasty piece of business.
Mote claimed large snowpack loss when he was Washington state’s climatologist. The state’s assistant climatologist, Mark Albright had data that disagreed and refused to toe the line with Mote. So, Mote discharged him. Mote also took the state climatologist position in Oregon when highly respected incumbent George Taylor refused to ignore the data and toe the line with our Governor.
Mote played politics in going after gubernatorial candidate Art Robinson. He emailed an environmental group that a Robinson victory “would put us in the tragic ranks of our climate colleagues at University of Oklahoma (Senator ‘global warming is a hoax’ Inhofe) and Univ of Alaska (Rep. ‘scientists have their opinion, I have mine’ Young).” Predictably, Mote’s email leaked to skeptics. Two days later he apologized for “inflammatory language” that failed “to conduct and communicate research objectively.”
Mote also says, “There is no plausible scenario in which (the Northwest) cools over the next 40 years,” he says. “It’s a problem we should be tackling.” Yet, NCDC data shows Northwest March-May temperatures have trended downward at a rate of 0.9 degrees F per decade during the last 28 years, 0.8 degrees F per decade during the last 20 years, and 3.2 degrees F per decade during the last 10 years.
If you read the Oregonian newspaper, you can’t find a climate article where an OSU researcher didn’t proclaim, “it’s worse than we thought.”
Mote was also a key player in causing OMSI ( the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry) to cancel a scheduled presentation on climate hosted by the Oregon Chapter of the American Meteorological Society by Climatologist George Taylor, Astrophysicist Gordon Fulks and myself. He claimed our work wasn’t “peer reviewed” science even though the material was thoroughly peer reviewed and accepted years ago as established physics. What Mote really didn’t like was the fact that our presentation had a credible refutation to his claims about how CO2 is changing the climate.
We succeeded in presenting with the assistance of the Oregon AMS but had to switch the meeting venue. The adverse publicity on Mote and OSU blew up in his face and actually gave us a record turn out for our presentation.
I debated Mote personally 10 years ago at the invitation of a private group and back then he claimed that using the work of Walter Elsasser, a physicist from Harvard ( whose work was also peer reviewed and found in most atmospheric dynamic meteorology text books on atmospheric radiation ) was “outdated” and superseded by his “superior” ideas incorporated into climate models. Last I heard, physics doesn’t get “outdated”. It must be proven wrong, refuted successfully with theory and observation. “Climate Science” has not disproven the founding work.
I am in the midst of fighting another battle which is connected to the Oregon Climate Change Research Institute today, where our Oregon Health Department claims heat waves are becoming more common to our region. The actual climate records support no such contention, and Mote’s office continues to supply government agencies in our area with projections of failed climate model simulations, suggesting they are still accurate and reliable, citing seal level rise of up to 54 inches
by 2100, more severe storms, declining snowpack, ect. Pure unsubstantiated climate hysteria.
Oregon State University has become a major bastion for the climate pimping of federal and state funding to the tune of tens of millions per year. I am ashamed of this great university as my own alma mater of stooping so low as to vacate the truth and integrity that should associate with science to the substitution of money, bureaucracy and power as a new relative truth. Oregon’s government as well as the federal government have become strange bed fellows of sort with academia. It appears they need each other to secure their futures which they view as large and robust bureaucracies, isolated from the free market economy as well as isolated from any accountability to the public in how their money is spent. Forcing carbon taxes and regulation from the EPA is a key component to the success of this goal.
Chuck Wiese
Meteorologist