A National Strategy for Advancing Climate Modeling (2012) / Chapter Skim
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12 Interface with User and Educational Communities
12 Interface with User and Educational Communities
Pages 209-222
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From page 209... ...
For example, infrastructure decisions such as power plant siting involve literally billions of dollars and are potentially affected by climate in numerous ways including interactions with sea-level rise, cooling system requirements, and regional power demands. Beyond that, the United States, like all nations, has a strategic interest in better understanding potential consequences of climate change as they may affect ourselves and other nations, as well as international lands and seas.
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Many of the costs of climate change, particularly unanticipated climate change, could be reflected and concentrated in this sector of the economy. The insurance sector is potentially affected by climate change in its role as a risk manager for economic agents.
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, the possibility of abrupt climate changes was considered with respect to potential destabilizing effects on the geopolitical environment that might lead to skirmishes, battles, and even war due to resource constraints -- food shortages, decreased availability and quality of freshwater in key regions, more frequent floods and droughts, and disrupted access to energy supplies due to extensive extreme weather. Concern also exists for maintaining the integrity of military installations, resources, and training programs within the United States (e.g., the Strategic Environmental Research and Development Program [SERDP]
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Public Policy Makers Public policy faces two challenges: determining interventions to control human actions that could affect climate (e.g., greenhouse gas emissions, land use, and aerosol emissions) and determining an appropriate response to present and potential future climate impacts.
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. The highly heterogeneous nature of the IAV research community means that climate information employed by this community is also highly heterogeneous.
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The development of this literature requires not only climate data and model outputs, but also accompanying socioeconomic and ecosystem information that is consistent with the forcing used to generate prospective climate changes. For the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report, climate models used socioeconomic scenarios taken from the Special Report on Emissions Scenarios, and IAV researchers were able to match these with associated prospective climate calculations.
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From page 215... ...
discusses at length the present state of education on climate change, education materials that are available, and the need to link education curricula to scientific advances. The previous NRC committee recommends several priority measures to which this committee also subscribes, including improved "national, state, and local climate education standards, climate curriculum development, teacher professional development, and production of supportive print and web materials." They also recommend a "national strategy and supporting network to coordinate climate change education and communication activities for policy makers and the general public, including the identification of essential informational needs; development of relevant, timely, and effective information products and services; construction and integration of information dissemination and sharing networks; and continuous evaluation and feedback systems to establish which approaches work best in what circumstances" (NRC, 2010d)
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From page 216... ...
. Finding 12.1: There is a wide variety of needs for climate information across the various user communities, being met with varied success and employing varied providers of climate services.
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They state that two of the principal challenges facing the climate modeling community are ensuring that "the ever-expanding volumes of data are easily and freely available to enable new scientific research," and "making sure that these data and the results that depend on them are useful to and understandable by a broad interdisciplinary audience." The committee recognizes that the transformation of climate data from model output to usable knowledge implies transformation and the creation of derivative data products. At each step, climate expertise will be required, including an understanding of what the data imply and the uncertainty associated with them.
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, which coordinates and influences research into adapting to climate change, and provides tools for and shares information with stakeholders. Finding 12.3: There is further need for climate interpreters to transform climate model output into usable information for a wide variety of decision makers.
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Interpreters would also have the ability to communicate user needs to those generating the climate model information. To keep climate interpreters informed about the evolving state of climate science and climate modeling, there need to be continuing education opportunities for climate interpreters; these could be provided as short courses at major national meetings or a national climate forum (see Chapter 13)
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They would also have the knowledge to communicate user needs to climate modelers and to help climate modelers deliver more useful data products, better reflecting evolving user needs. This could evolve into a system of true coproduction of meaningful usable knowledge on future climate change from both climate scientists' and users' perspectives.
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From page 221... ...
Similarly, direct communications between climate modelers and research users of climate data, such as those in the IAV community, will not be interrupted, although researchers needing access to knowledge about how to access and use existing data products would find this climate translator skill set potentially helpful. Regardless of whether the current communications pathways between national decision makers and collaborative researchers are deemed adequate or not, the growing demand for climate data products would benefit from trained certified professional climate translators who could help establish and maintain two-way communications between climate scientists and data product users.
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