Arquivo da tag: Mudanças climáticas

Where Did Global Warming Go? (N.Y. Times)

24/11/2011Uncategorizedciência, Clima, discurso ambiental, Economia, Enquadramento, Incerteza, jornalismo, Mídia, Meteorologia, Mudanças climáticas, Opinião pública, Política, Previsão, Visualidaderenzotaddei

By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL

Published: October 15, 2011

Mark Pernice and Scott Altmann

IN 2008, both the Democratic and Republican candidates for president, Barack Obama and John McCain, warned about man-made global warming and supported legislation to curb emissions. After he was elected, President Obama promised “a new chapter in America’s leadership on climate change,” and arrived cavalry-like at the 2009 United Nations Climate Conference in Copenhagen to broker a global pact.

But two years later, now that nearly every other nation accepts climate change as a pressing problem, America has turned agnostic on the issue.

In the crowded Republican presidential field, most seem to agree with Gov. Rick Perry of Texas that “the science is not settled” on man-made global warming, as he said in a debate last month. Alone among Republicans onstage that night, Jon M. Huntsman Jr. said that he trusted scientists’ view that the problem was real. At the moment, he has the backing of about 2 percent of likely Republican voters.

Though the evidence of climate change has, if anything, solidified, Mr. Obama now talks about “green jobs” mostly as a strategy for improving the economy, not the planet. He did not mention climate in his last State of the Union address. Meanwhile, the administration is fighting to exempt United States airlines from Europe’s new plan to charge them for CO2 emissions when they land on the continent. It also seems poised to approve a nearly 2,000-mile-long pipeline, from Canada down through the United States, that will carry a kind of oil. Extracting it will put relatively high levels of emissions into the atmosphere.

“In Washington, ‘climate change’ has become a lightning rod, it’s a four-letter word,” said Andrew J. Hoffman, director of the University of Michigan’s Erb Institute for Sustainable Development.

Across the nation, too, belief in man-made global warming, and passion about doing something to arrest climate change, is not what it was five years or so ago, when Al Gore’s movie had buzz and Elizabeth Kolbert’s book about climate change, “Field Notes From a Catastrophe,” was a best seller. The number of Americans who believe the earth is warming dropped to 59 percent last year from 79 percent in 2006, according to polling by the Pew Research Group. When the British polling firm Ipsos Mori asked Americans this past summer to list their three most pressing environmental worries, “global warming/climate change” garnered only 27 percent, behind even “overpopulation.”

This fading of global warming from the political agenda is a mostly American phenomenon. True, public enthusiasm for legislation to tackle climate change has flagged somewhat throughout the developed world since the recession of 2008. Nonetheless, in many other countries, legislation to control emissions has rolled out apace. Just last Wednesday, Australia’s House of Representatives passed a carbon tax, which is expected to easily clear the country’s Senate. Europe’s six-year-old carbon emissions trading system continues its yearly expansion. In 2010, India passed a carbon tax on coal. Even China’s newest five-year plan contains a limited pilot cap-and-trade system, under which polluters pay for excess pollution.

The United States is the “one significant outlier” on responding to climate change, according to a recent global research report produced by HSBC, the London-based bank. John Ashton, Britain’s special representative for climate change, said in an interview that “in the U.K., in Europe, in most places I travel to” — but not in the United States — “the starting point for conversation is that this is real, there are clear and present dangers, so let’s get a move on and respond.” After watching the Republican candidates express skepticism about global warming in early September, former President Bill Clinton put it more bluntly, “I mean, it makes us — we look like a joke, right?”

Americans — who produce twice the emissions per capita that Europeans do — are in many ways wired to be holdouts. We prefer bigger cars and bigger homes. We value personal freedom, are suspicious of scientists, and tend to distrust the kind of sweeping government intervention required to confront rising greenhouse gas emissions.

“Climate change presents numerous ideological challenges to our culture and our beliefs,” Professor Hoffman of the Erb Institute says. “People say, ‘Wait a second, this is really going to affect how we live!’ ”

There are, of course, other factors that hardened resistance: America’s powerful fossil-fuel industry, whose profits are bound to be affected by any greater control of carbon emissions; a cold American winter in 2010 that made global warming seem less imminent; and a deep recession that made taxes on energy harder to talk about, and job creation a more pressing issue than the environment — as can be seen in the debate over the pipeline from Canada.

But it is also true that Europe has endured a deep recession and has had mild winters. What’s more, some of the loudest climate deniers are English. Yet the European Union is largely on target to meet its goal of reducing emissions by at least 20 percent over 1990 levels by 2020.

Connie Hedegaard, the European Union’s commissioner on climate action, told me recently: “Look, it was not a piece of cake here either.”

In fact, many countries in Europe have come to see combating climate change and the move to a “greener” economy as about “opportunities rather than costs,” Mr. Ashton said. In Britain, the low-carbon manufacturing sector has been one of the few to grow through the economic slump.

“One thing I’ve been pleasantly surprised about in the E.U. is that despite the economic and financial crisis, the momentum on climate change has more or less continued,” Mr. Ashton said.

And Conservatives, rather than posing an obstacle, are directing aggressive climate policies in much of the world. Before becoming the European Union’s commissioner for climate action, Ms. Hedegaard was a well-known Conservative politician in her native Denmark. In Britain, where a 2008 law required deep cuts in emissions, a coalition Conservative government is now championing a Green Deal.

In the United States, the right wing of the Republican Party has managed to turn skepticism about man-made global warming into a requirement for electability, forming an unlikely triad with antiabortion and gun-rights beliefs. In findings from a Pew poll this spring, 75 percent of staunch conservatives, 63 percent of libertarians and 55 percent of Main Street Republicans said there was no solid evidence of global warming.

“This has become a partisan political issue here in a way it has not elsewhere,” said Andrew Kohut, president of the Pew Research Center. “We are seeing doubts in the U.S. largely because the issue has become a partisan one, with Democrats” — 75 percent of whom say they believe there is strong evidence of climate change — “seeing one thing and Republicans another.”

Europeans understand the challenges in the United States, though they sound increasingly impatient. “We are very much aware of the political situation in the United States and we don’t say ‘do this,’ when we know it can’t get through Congress,” said Ms. Hedegaard, when she was in New York for the United Nations General Assembly last month. But she added:

“O.K. if you can’t commit today, when can you? When are you willing to join in? Australia is making a cap-and-trade system. South Korea is introducing one. New Zealand and the E.U. have it already. So when is the time? That’s the question for the U.S.”

MEANWHILE, in the developing world, emerging economies like India and China are now pursuing aggressive climate policies. “Two years ago the assumption was that the developed world would have to lead, but now China, India and Brazil have jumped in with enthusiasm, and are moving ahead,” said Nick Robins of HSBC Global Research.

Buffeted by two years of treacherous weather that they are less able to handle than richer nations — from floods in India to water shortages in China — developing countries are feeling vulnerable. Scientists agree that extreme weather events will be more severe and frequent on a warming planet, and insurance companies have already documented an increase.

So perhaps it is no surprise that regard for climate change as “a very serious problem” has risen significantly in many developing nations over the past two years. A 2010 Pew survey showed that more than 70 percent of people in China, India and South Korea were willing to pay more for energy in order to address climate change. The number in the United States was 38 percent. China’s 12th five-year plan, for 2011-2015, directs intensive investment to low carbon industries. In contrast, in the United States, there is “no prospect of moving ahead” at a national legislative level, Mr. Robins said, although some state governments are addressing the issue.

In private, scientific advisers to Mr. Obama say he and his administration remain committed to confronting climate change and global warming. But Robert E. O’Connor, program director for decision, risk and management sciences at the National Science Foundation in Washington, said a bolder leader would emphasize real risks that, apparently, now feel distant to many Americans. “If it’s such an important issue, why isn’t he talking about it?”

Elisabeth Rosenthal is a reporter and blogger on environmental issues for The New York Times.

Why Culture Matters in the Climate Debate (The Yale Forum on Climate Change & The Media)

24/11/2011UncategorizedClima, comunicação científica, Cultura, Enquadramento, Incerteza, Mídia, Meteorologia, Mudanças climáticas, Opinião pública, Política, Políticas públicas, Previsão, Visualidaderenzotaddei

Keith Kloor, October 25, 2011

A new paper argues that climate educators and communicators are ignoring deeply held beliefs that influence climate skepticism.

It is the great riddle of the day in climate circles: Why is public concern about global warming so shallow, and why do widespread doubts about man-made climate change persist?

Everyone seems to have a pet theory. Al Gore blames the media and President Obama. Some green critics argue that Gore should look in the mirror. Let’s not ignore the recession, scholars remind us. Yes, but the lion’s share of blame must go to those “merchants of doubt”, particularly fossil fuel interests, and climate skeptics, plenty others assert. Err, actually, it’s our brain that’s the biggest problem, social scientists now say.

Commentary

Another reason, similar to that last one, is that cultural and religious beliefs predispose many to dismiss evidence that humans can greatly influence the climate. In fact, geographer Simon Donner in a paper published this week in Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, argues:

“Successful climate change education and outreach programs should be designed to help overcome perceived conflict between climate science and long-held cultural beliefs, drawing upon lessons from communication and education of other potentially divisive subjects like evolution.”

Donner is not the first to try to bridge the gap between science and religion. E.O. Wilson gamely attempted to do so several years ago, with his book, The Creation. In a 2006 interview with NPR, Wilson acknowledged that, “the usual approach of secular science is to marginalize religion” in debates on environmental issues. After the book’s publication, this writer facilitated a lengthy dialogue between Wilson, ecologist Stuart Pimm and leading evangelical Richard Cizik, on areas where science and religion could find common ground. Expanding on that public dialogue has proven difficult. If anything, the polarized political landscape and the continuing climate wars have narrowed the space for science and religion to be reconciled.

Still, those who want to overcome obstacles to climate action should be mindful of culture’s importance, Donner stresses in his paper. He writes that “lingering public uncertainty about anthropogenic climate change may be rooted in an important but largely unrecognized conflict between climate science and some long held beliefs. In many cultures, the weather and climate have historically been viewed as too vast and too grand to be directly influenced by people.”

Donner writes that scholars studying public attitudes on climate change should factor in such cultural worldviews when accounting for climate skepticism. He surmises: “Underlying doubts that human activity can influence the climate may explain some of the malleability of public opinion about the scientific evidence for climate change.”

Donner suggests that climate educators and communicators learn from approaches that have worked in the evolution debate. He informs us:

“Pedagogical research on evolution finds that providing the audience with opportunities to evaluate how their culture or beliefs affect their willingness to accept scientific evidence is more effective than attempting to separate scientific views from religious or cultural views.”

Moreover, Donner argues that “reforming public communication” on climate change “will require humility on the part of scientists and educators.” He concludes:

“Climate scientists, for whom any inherent doubts about the possible extent of human influence on the climate were overcome by years of training in physics and chemistry of the climate system, need to accept that there are rational cultural, religious and historical reasons that the public may fail to believe that anthropogenic climate change is real, let alone that it warrants a policy response. It is unreasonable to expect a lay audience, not armed with the same analytical tools as scientists, to develop lasting acceptance during a one-hour public seminar of a scientific conclusion that runs counters to thousands of years of human belief. Without addressing the common long-standing belief that human activity cannot directly influence the climate, public acceptance of climate change and public engagement on climate solutions will not persist through the next cold winter or the next economic meltdown.”

The intersection where science and religion meet is all too often home to an ugly collision. Donner advises that such crack-ups can and should be avoided in the climate debate.

Can it be done?

Keith Kloor is a New York City-based freelance journalist who writes often about the environment and climate change. (E-mail: keith@yaleclimatemediaforum.org)

Scientists Find Evidence of Ancient Megadrought in Southwestern U.S. (Science Daily)

07/11/2011Uncategorizedciência, Clima, Incerteza, Mediação tecnológica, Meteorologia, Mudanças climáticas, Previsão, Seca, Visualidaderenzotaddei

ScienceDaily (Nov. 6, 2011) — A new study at the the University of Arizona’s Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research has revealed a previously unknown multi-decade drought period in the second century A.D. The findings give evidence that extended periods of aridity have occurred at intervals throughout our past.

A cross section of wood shows the annual growth rings trees add with each growing season. Dark bands of latewood form the boundary between each ring and the next. Counting backwards from the bark reveals a tree’s age. (Credit: Photo by Daniel Griffin/Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research)

Almost 900 years ago, in the mid-12^th century, the southwestern U.S. was in the middle of a multi-decade megadrought. It was the most recent extended period of severe drought known for this region. But it was not the first.

The second century A.D. saw an extended dry period of more than 100 years characterized by a multi-decade drought lasting nearly 50 years, says a new study from scientists at the University of Arizona.

UA geoscientists Cody Routson, Connie Woodhouse and Jonathan Overpeck conducted a study of the southern San Juan Mountains in south-central Colorado. The region serves as a primary drainage site for the Rio Grande and San Juan rivers.

“These mountains are very important for both the San Juan River and the Rio Grande River,” said Routson, a doctoral candidate in the environmental studies laboratory of the UA’s department of geosciences and the primary author of the study, which is upcoming in Geophysical Research Letters.

The San Juan River is a tributary for the Colorado River, meaning any climate changes that affect the San Juan drainage also likely would affect the Colorado River and its watershed. Said Routson: “We wanted to develop as long a record as possible for that region.”

Dendrochronology is a precise science of using annual growth rings of trees to understand climate in the past. Because trees add a normally clearly defined growth ring around their trunk each year, counting the rings backwards from a tree’s bark allows scientists to determine not only the age of the tree, but which years were good for growth and which years were more difficult.

“If it’s a wet year, they grow a wide ring, and if it’s a dry year, they grow a narrow ring,” said Routson. “If you average that pattern across trees in a region you can develop a chronology that shows what years were drier or wetter for that particular region.”

Darker wood, referred to as latewood because it develops in the latter part of the year at the end of the growing season, forms a usually distinct boundary between one ring and the next. The latewood is darker because growth at the end of the growing season has slowed and the cells are more compact.

To develop their chronology, the researchers looked for indications of climate in the past in the growth rings of the oldest trees in the southern San Juan region. “We drove around and looked for old trees,” said Routson.

Literally nothing is older than a bristlecone pine tree: The oldest and longest-living species on the planet, these pine trees normally are found clinging to bare rocky landscapes of alpine or near-alpine mountain slopes. The trees, the oldest of which are more than 4,000 years old, are capable of withstanding extreme drought conditions.

“We did a lot of hiking and found a couple of sites of bristlecone pines, and one in particular that we honed in on,” said Routson.

To sample the trees without damaging them, the dendrochronologists used a tool like a metal screw that bores a tiny hole in the trunk of the tree and allows them to extract a sample, called a core. “We take a piece of wood about the size and shape of a pencil from the tree,” explained Routson.

“We also sampled dead wood that was lying about the land. We took our samples back to the lab where we used a visual, graphic technique to match where the annual growth patterns of the living trees overlap with the patterns in the dead wood. Once we have the pattern matched we measure the rings and average these values to generate a site chronology.”

“In our chronology for the south San Juan mountains we created a record that extends back 2,200 years,” said Routson. “It was pretty profound that we were able to get back that far.”

The chronology extends many years earlier than the medieval period, during which two major drought events in that region already were known from previous chronologies.

“The medieval period extends roughly from 800 to 1300 A.D.,” said Routson. “During that period there was a lot of evidence from previous studies for increased aridity, in particular two major droughts: one in the middle of the 12^th century, and one at the end of the 13^th century.”

“Very few records are long enough to assess the global conditions associated with these two periods of Southwestern aridity,” said Routson. “And the available records have uncertainties.”

But the chronology from the San Juan bristlecone pines showed something completely new:

“There was another period of increased aridity even earlier,” said Routson. “This new record shows that in addition to known droughts from the medieval period, there is also evidence for an earlier megadrought during the second century A.D.”

“What we can see from our record is that it was a period of basically 50 consecutive years of below-average growth,” said Routson. “And that’s within a much broader period that extends from around 124 A.D. to 210 A.D. — about a 100-year-long period of dry conditions.”

“We’re showing that there are multiple extreme drought events that happened during our past in this region,” said Routson. “These megadroughts lasted for decades, which is much longer than our current drought. And the climatic events behind these previous dry periods are really similar to what we’re experiencing today.”

The prolonged drought in the 12^th century and the newly discovered event in the second century A.D. may both have been influenced by warmer-than-average Northern Hemisphere temperatures, Routson said: “The limited records indicate there may have been similar La Nina-like background conditions in the tropical Pacific Ocean, which are known to influence modern drought, during the two periods.”

Although natural climate variation has led to extended dry periods in the southwestern U.S. in the past, there is reason to believe that human-driven climate change will increase the frequency of extreme droughts in the future, said Routson. In other words, we should expect similar multi-decade droughts in a future predicted to be even warmer than the past.

Routson’s research is funded by fellowships from the National Science Foundation, the Science Foundation Arizona and the Climate Assessment of the Southwest. His advisors, Woodhouse of the School of Geography and Development and Overpeck of the department of geosciences and co-director of the UA’s Institute of the Environment, are co-authors of the study.

The Human Cause of Climate Change: Where Does the Burden of Proof Lie? (Science Daily)

05/11/2011Uncategorizedciência, Clima, comunicação científica, Enquadramento, Incerteza, Mediação tecnológica, Meteorologia, Mudanças climáticas, Opinião pública, Política, Previsãorenzotaddei

ScienceDaily (Nov. 3, 2011) — The debate may largely be drawn along political lines, but the human role in climate change remains one of the most controversial questions in 21st century science. Writing in WIREs Climate Change Dr Kevin Trenberth, from the National Center for Atmospheric Research, argues that the evidence for anthropogenic climate change is now so clear that the burden of proof should lie with research which seeks to disprove the human role.

Polar bear on melting ice. Experts argue that the evidence for anthropogenic climate change is now so clear that the burden of proof should lie with research which seeks to disprove the human role. (Credit: iStockphoto/Kristian Septimius Krogh)

In response to Trenberth’s argument a second review, by Dr Judith Curry, focuses on the concept of a ‘null hypothesis’ the default position which is taken when research is carried out. Currently the null hypothesis for climate change attribution research is that humans have no influence.

“Humans are changing our climate. There is no doubt whatsoever,” said Trenberth. “Questions remain as to the extent of our collective contribution, but it is clear that the effects are not small and have emerged from the noise of natural variability. So why does the science community continue to do attribution studies and assume that humans have no influence as a null hypothesis?”

To show precedent for his position Trenberth cites the 2007 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change which states that global warming is “unequivocal,” and is “very likely” due to human activities.

Trenberth also focused on climate attribution studies which claim the lack of a human component, and suggested that the assumptions distort results in the direction of finding no human influence, resulting in misleading statements about the causes of climate change that can serve to grossly underestimate the role of humans in climate events.

“Scientists must challenge misconceptions in the difference between weather and climate while attribution studies must include a human component,” concluded Trenberth. “The question should no longer be is there a human component, but what is it?”

In a second paper Dr Judith Curry, from the Georgia Institute of Technology, questions this position, but argues that the discussion on the null hypothesis serves to highlight fuzziness surrounding the many hypotheses related to dangerous climate change.

“Regarding attribution studies, rather than trying to reject either hypothesis regardless of which is the null, there should be a debate over the significance of anthropogenic warming relative to forced and unforced natural climate variability,” said Curry.

Curry also suggested that the desire to reverse the null hypothesis may have the goal of seeking to marginalise the climate sceptic movement, a vocal group who have challenged the scientific orthodoxy on climate change.

“The proponents of reversing the null hypothesis should be careful of what they wish for,” concluded Curry. “One consequence may be that the scientific focus, and therefore funding, would also reverse to attempting to disprove dangerous anthropogenic climate change, which has been a position of many sceptics.”

“I doubt Trenberth’s suggestion will find much support in the scientific community,” said Professor Myles Allen from Oxford University, “but Curry’s counter proposal to abandon hypothesis tests is worse. We still have plenty of interesting hypotheses to test: did human influence on climate increase the risk of this event at all? Did it increase it by more than a factor of two?”

Governo apresenta oficialmente oito propostas para a Rio+20 (Jornal da Ciência)

01/11/2011Uncategorizedambientalismo, Cidadania, Clima, discurso ambiental, Economia, Incerteza, Mudanças climáticas, Previsãorenzotaddei

JC e-mail 4376, de 01 de Novembro de 2011.

O governo apresenta nesta terça-feira (1º) a versão oficial do documento com oito propostas para a Conferência das Nações Unidas sobre o Desenvolvimento Sustentável, conhecida como Rio+20, a ser realizada no Rio de Janeiro de 28 de maio a 6 de junho de 2012. O documento foi apresentado hoje pela ministra do Meio Ambiente, Izabella Teixeira e pelo Itamaraty, em coletiva de imprensa, em Brasília.

A primeira proposta é a criação de um programa de proteção socioambiental global, cujo objetivo é assegurar garantia de renda para superar a pobreza extrema no mundo e promover ações estruturantes que garantam qualidade ambiental, segurança alimentar, moradia adequada e acesso à água limpa para todos.

A ideia desse programa, conforme consta do documento, é fazer com que “toda estrutura multilateral opere” para facilitar o acesso a tecnologias, recursos financeiros, infraestrutura e capacitação, a fim de que todas as pessoas tenham a quantidade e qualidade mínima de alimento, água e ambiente saudável.

Pela proposta brasileira, esse programa teria como foco uma estratégia de garantia de renda adequada às condições de cada país, diante de um momento de crise internacional em que se mobilizam vastos recursos globais para a recuperação do sistema financeiro. “O programa seria uma aposta no componente social, importante na solução brasileira para o enfrentamento da crise”, destaca o documento. “Essa é uma plataforma de diálogo global que poderia ser um passo crucial rumo ao desenvolvimento sustentável, com potencial para reforçar o papel virtuoso do multilateralismo”, complementa.

Na segunda proposta, o governo sugere a implementação de “objetivos de desenvolvimento sustentável”, adotando um programa de economia verde inclusiva, em lugar “de negociações complexas que busquem o estabelecimento de metas restritivas vinculantes”. Dentre outros, esses objetivos poderiam estar associados a erradicação da pobreza extrema; a segurança alimentar e nutricional; acesso a empregos adequados (socialmente justos e ambientalmente corretos); acesso a fontes adequadas de energia; a microempreendedorismo e microcrédito; a inovação para a sustentabilidade; acesso a fontes adequadas de recursos hídricos; e adequação da pegada ecológica à capacidade de regeneração do planeta.

Compras públicas sustentáveis – Na terceira proposta, o Brasil sugere um pacto global para produção e consumo sustentáveis. Ou seja, um conjunto de iniciativas para promover mudanças nos padrões de produção e consumo em diversos setores. Dessa forma, poderiam ser adotadas, com caráter prioritário, iniciativas que ofereçam suporte político a compras públicas sustentáveis, já que essas representam parte significativa da economia internacional, de cerca de 15% do Produto Interno Bruto (PIB) mundial; a classificações de consumo e eficiência energética; e financiamento de estudos e pesquisas para o desenvolvimento sustentável (com o objetivo de qualificar recursos humanos de alto nível e apoiar projetos científicos, tecnológicos e inovadores).

A quarta proposta sugere estabelecer repositório de iniciativas para dinamizar os mecanismos nacionais e de cooperação internacional, inclusive a utilização de recursos dos organismos multilaterais. Já a quinta sugestão propõe a criação de protocolo internacional para a sustentabilidade do setor financeiro.

Na sexta proposta o governo sugere novos indicadores para mensuração do desenvolvimento. Hoje os mais importantes são o Índice de Desenvolvimento Humano (IDH) e o Produto Interno Bruto (PIB) que, como medida de desenvolvimento sustentável, “são claramente limitadas”, por não integrarem a grande diversidade de aspectos sociais e ambientais aos valores econômicos, o que induz, segundo o documento, a percepções errôneas do grau de desenvolvimento e de progresso dos países.

Na sétima proposta o governo sugere a implementação de um “pacto pela economia verde inclusiva. A ideia é estimular a divulgação de relatórios e de índices de sustentabilidade por empresas estatais, bancos de fomento, patrocinadoras de entidades de previdência privada, empresas de capital aberto e empresas de grande porte. Ou seja, além dos aspectos econômico-financeiros, essas instituições incluam nas divulgações, obrigatoriamente, e de acordo com padrões internacionalmente aceitos e comparáveis, informações sobre suas atuações em termos sociais, ambientais e de governança corporativa.

Por sua vez, a oitava proposta é ligada a “estrutura institucional do desenvolvimento sustentável. Essa aborda vários tópicos, dentre os quais a adoção de mecanismo de coordenação institucional para o desenvolvimento sustentável”; reforma do Conselho Econômico e Social das Nações Unidas (ECOSOC), transformando-o em Conselho de Desenvolvimento Sustentável das Nações Unidas; aperfeiçoamento da governança ambiental internacional; o lançamento de processo negociador para uma convenção global sobre acesso à informação, participação pública na tomada de decisões e acesso à justiça em temas ambientais; e a governança da água.

(Viviane Monteiro – Jornal da Ciência)

Brasil já pesquisa efeitos da mudança do clima (Valor Econômico)

29/10/2011Uncategorizedciência, Clima, comunicação científica, discurso ambiental, Economia, Enquadramento, Incerteza, Meteorologia, Mudanças climáticas, Política, Políticas públicas, Previsãorenzotaddei

JC e-mail 4373, de 27 de Outubro de 2011.

As pesquisas em mudança climática no Brasil começam a mudar de rumo. Se há alguns anos o foco estava nos esforços de redução das emissões dos gases-estufa, agora miram a adaptação ao fenômeno.

“Sabemos que nos próximos cinco ou dez anos não há perspectiva para que seja firmado internacionalmente um acordo de redução nas emissões de gases-estufa de grandes proporções, com cortes entre 70% a 80%”, diz o físico Paulo Artaxo, da USP, um estudioso da Amazônia. “Esse panorama é cada vez mais longínquo. Portanto é fundamental que se estudem estratégias de adaptação.”

Em outras palavras, as pesquisas devem se voltar para os efeitos da mudança do clima nos ecossistemas, em ambientes urbanos, em contextos sociais. “Não é uma questão de dinheiro, mas de direcionamento dos estudos”, diz Artaxo, membro do conselho diretor do Painel Brasileiro de Mudança Climática, órgão científico ligado aos ministérios da Ciência e Tecnologia e Ambiente. “O País precisa se preparar mais adequadamente para a mudança climática.”

“É preciso pesquisar mais, por exemplo, as alterações no ciclo hidrológico”, cita Reynaldo Victoria, coordenador do Programa Fapesp de Pesquisa sobre Mudanças Climáticas Globais. “Saber onde vai chover mais e onde vai chover menos”, explica. É um dos braços da pesquisa de Artaxo na Amazônia. “Porque não se quer construir uma hidrelétrica onde choverá muito menos nas próximas décadas”, ilustra o físico.

O programa de mudança climática da Fapesp já conta com investimentos de US$ 30 milhões em projetos na área. É um dos braços mais novos da fundação, mas já está ganhando musculatura. Tem 21 projetos em andamento, 14 contratos novos, dois outros em parceria com instituições estrangeiras, como o britânico Natural Environment Research Council (Nerc) ou a francesa Agence Nationale de la Recherche (ANR). Em dez anos, a previsão é de investimentos de mais de R$ 100 milhões.

As pesquisas começam a se voltar para campos pouco estudados. “Vamos analisar questões críticas para o Brasil”, diz Artaxo. Ele cita, por exemplo, o ciclo de carbono na Amazônia – algo muito mais complexo do que estudar a fotossíntese e a respiração das plantas.

Victoria, que também é professor do Centro de Energia Nuclear Aplicada à Agricultura (Cena-USP), diz que a intenção do programa é mirar campos novos, como entender qual o papel do Atlântico Sul no clima da região Sul do Brasil e Norte da Argentina. Outro exemplo é obter registros históricos na área de paleoclima.

Os impactos na área de saúde também serão mais estudados. Já se sabe que a mudança do clima faz com que doenças que não existiam em determinado lugar, passem a ocorrer. A dengue, por exemplo, encontra ambiente propício em regiões mais quentes. Entre as novas pesquisas de doenças emergentes há o estudo de um tipo de leishmaniose, comum na Bolívia e no Peru, que não existia no Brasil e agora ameaça surgir no Acre. Provocada por um mosquito, a doença causa uma infecção cutânea e pode ser mortal.

Os pesquisadores falaram sobre seus projetos durante a Fapesp Week, evento que faz parte da comemoração pelos 50 anos da Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo e terminou ontem, em Washington.

Terra, que Tempo é Esse? (PUC)

29/10/2011Uncategorizedambientalismo, Antropologia, Clima, discurso ambiental, Economia, Enquadramento, História, Incerteza, Mídia, Meteorologia, Mudanças climáticas, Política, Políticas públicas, Previsão, Visualidaderenzotaddei

Por Gabriela Caesar – Do Portal, 28/10/2011. Fotos: Eduardo de Holanda.

Embora a “soberania nacional e o mercado criem cenário conflitoso”, a população está consciente de que o estilo de vida precisa mudar, acredita o antropólogo Roberto da Matta. Já a jornalista Sônia Bridi pondera que “não adianta discutir ou culpar quem começou”, mas trocar o modelo de produção. Reunidos na PUC-Rio para o debate “Terra, que tempo é esse?” (assista às partes 1 e 2 abaixo), nesta segunda-feira (24), com mediação do professor Paulo Ferracioli, do Departamento de Economia, eles reforçaram a importância de um desenvolvimento mais alinhado às demandas ambientais.

O secretário estadual do Ambiente, Carlos Minc (PT-RJ), acrescentou que a negociação com grandes empresas, como a Companhia Siderúrgica Nacional (CSN), deve incluir o acompanhamento de tecnologias que possam não só diminuir as agressões ambientais, mas também resguardar a saúde dos trabalhadores. Ainda em relação a tecnologias “ecologicamente corretas”, Sônia Bridi afirmou que o estado do Rio “erra ao se decidir por ônibus, em vez de veículo leve sobre trilho”.

Diante dos aproximadamente cem estudantes que acompanhavam o debate no auditório do RDC, Roberto da Matta destacou que a mudança para um estilo de vida mais saudável e comprometido com o ambiente revela-se igualmente importante para combater outro problema, segundo ele, agravado pela globalização: a obesidade mórbida, que dá origem ao neologismo “globesidade”. Para diminuir o avanço da doença, que aumentou em um terço na China, o antropólogo é categórico ao propor um padrão social menos consumista.

Usina de contrastes e um dos principais lubrificantes do consumo mundial, a China encara o desafio de reduzir as faturas ambientais – alvo recorrente de críticas em foruns internacionais – e de saúde. Para Sônia Bridi, a locomotiva da economia global investe no longo prazo:

– Até 2020, a China terá 20 mil quilômetros de trem bala. Eles estão preocupados com isso, porque a qualidade da saúde deles está piorando muito.

O trilho do desenvolvimento responsável não passa necessariemente por grandes investimentos. O diretor do Núcleo Interdisciplinar do Meio Ambiente (Nima), Luiz Felipe Guanaes, lembrou que iniciativas como a coleta seletiva, implantada em junho deste ano no campus da PUC-Rio, também aproximam o cidadão de um maior compromisso ambiental e social. Outra oportunidade de a “comunidade se engajar na causa”, lembrou ele, será o encontro de pesquisadores e especialistas na universidade em 2012, para a Rio+20, em parceria com a ONU.

Sônia também contou bastidores da série de reportagem “Terra, que país é esse?” – que mostrou os avanços do aquecimento global e nomeou o debate. No Peru, ela e o repórter cinematográfico Paulo Zero notaram o impacto no cotidiano, até em rituais.

– Num determinado dia, próximo à festa do Corpus Christi, confrarias do país inteiro sobem certa montanha e colhem blocos de gelo. Tiveram de mudar o ritual, que vem do tempo dos incas, incorporado pelo cristianismo. Eles pararam de tirar gelo.

Paulo Zero admite que a produção jornalística, atrelada ao cumprimento de prazos “curtos”, dificulta o tratamento do assunto. Outra barreira, diz Paulo, pode ser a logística. Para a reportagem na Groelândia, por exemplo, ele e Sônia navegaram por seis horas até chegar à ilha. Se o trajeto atrapalhou, a sorte foi uma aliada.

– Chegamos à geleira e, em cinco minutos, caiu um grande bloco de gelo. Ficamos mais três horas lá e não caiu mais nenhum pedaço de gelo. Ou seja, estávamos na hora certa e no lugar certo – contou o cinegrafista.

Parte 1 (clique na imagem)

Parte 2 (clique na imagem)

Limite próximo (Fapesp)

29/10/2011Uncategorizedambientalismo, ciência, Clima, discurso ambiental, Economia, Incerteza, Meteorologia, Mudanças climáticas, Política, Políticas públicas, Previsãorenzotaddei

Amazônia está muito próxima de um ponto de não retorno para sua sobrevivência, diz Thomas Lovejoy, da George Mason University, no simpósio internacional FAPESP Week (foto: JVInfante Photography/Wilson Center)

27/10/2011

Agência FAPESP – A Amazônia está muito próxima de um ponto de não retorno para sua sobrevivência, devido a uma combinação de fatores que incluem aquecimento global, desflorestamento e queimadas que minam seu sistema hidrogeológico.

A advertência foi feita por Thomas Lovejoy, atualmente professor da George Mason University, no Estado de Virgínia, EUA, no primeiro dia do simpósio internacional FAPESP Week, em Washington, nesta segunda-feira.

O biólogo Lovejoy, um dos mais importantes especialistas em Amazônia do mundo, começou a trabalhar na floresta brasileira em 1965, “apenas três anos depois da fundação da FAPESP”, lembrou.

Apesar de muita coisa positiva ter acontecido nestes 47 anos (“quando pisei pela primeira vez em Belém, só havia uma floresta nacional e uma área indígena demarcada e quase nenhum cientista brasileiro se interessava em estudar a Amazônia; hoje esse situação está totalmente invertida”), também apareceram no período diversos fatores de preocupação.

Lovejoy acredita que restam cinco anos para inverter as tendências em tempo de evitar problemas de maior gravidade. O aquecimento da temperatura média do planeta já está na casa de 0,8 grau centígrado. Ele acredita que o limite aceitável é de 2 graus centígrados e que ele pode ser alcançado até 2016 se nada for feito para efetivamente reduzi-lo.

O objetivo fixado nas mais recentes reuniões sobre o clima em Cancun e Copenhague de limitar o aumento médio da temperatura média global em 2 graus centígrados pode ser insuficiente, na opinião de Lovejoy, devido a essa conjugação de elementos.

De forma similar, Lovejoy crê que 20% de desflorestamento em relação ao tamanho original da Amazônia é o máximo que ela consegue suportar e o atual índice já é de 17% (em 1965, a taxa era de 3%).

A boa notícia, diz o biólogo, é que há bastante terra abandonada, sem nenhuma perspectiva de utilização econômica na Amazônia e que pode ser de alguma forma reflorestada, o que poderia proporcionar certa margem de segurança.

Em sua palestra, Lovejoy saudou vários cientistas brasileiros como exemplares em excelência em suas pesquisas. Entre outros, Eneas Salati, Carlos Nobre e Carlos Joly.

Indigenous Voices on Climate Change

29/10/2011UncategorizedÍndios, Cidadania, Clima, Conhecimento tradicional, Cultura, discurso ambiental, Economia, Enquadramento, Incerteza, Meteorologia, Mudanças climáticas, Opinião pública, Oralidade, participatividade, Política, Previsão, sociedade civil, Visualidaderenzotaddei

Video streaming by Ustream

Weathering Fights – Science: What’s It Up To? (The Daily Show with Jon Stewart)

28/10/2011Uncategorizedciência, Clima, Enquadramento, Humor, Incerteza, Mudanças climáticas, Opinião pública, Política, Previsão, Sensacionalismorenzotaddei

http://media.mtvnservices.com/mgid:cms:video:thedailyshow.com:400760

Science claims it’s working to cure disease, save the planet and solve the greatest human mysteries, but Aasif Mandvi finds out what it’s really up to. (05:47) – Comedy Central

Global Warming May Worsen Effects of El Niño, La Niña Events (Climate Central)

27/10/2011Uncategorizedciência, Clima, comunicação científica, Desastre, El Niño, Incerteza, Meteorologia, Mudanças climáticas, Previsãorenzotaddei

Published: October 12th, 2011

By Michael D. Lemonick

Does this mean Texas is toast?

As just about everyone knows, El Niño is a periodic unusual warming of the surface water in the eastern and central tropical Pacific Ocean. Actually, that’s pretty much a lie. Most people don’t know the definition of El Niño or its mirror image, La Niña, and truthfully, most people don’t much care.

What you do care about if you’re a Texan suffering through the worst one-year drought on record, or a New Yorker who had to dig out from massive snowstorms last winter (tied in part to La Niña), or a Californian who has ever had to deal with the torrential rains that trigger catastrophic mudslides (linked to El Niño), is that these natural climate cycles can elevate the odds of natural disasters where you live.

At the moment, we’re now entering the second year of the La Niña part of the cycle. La Niña is one key reason why the Southwest was so dry last winter and through the spring and summer, and since La Niña is projected to continue through the coming winter, Texas and nearby states aren’t likely to get much relief.

Precipitation outlook for winter 2011-12, showing the likelihood of below average precipitation in Texas and other drought-stricken states.

But Niñas and Niños (the broader cycle, for you weather/climate geeks, is known as the “El Niño-Southern Oscillation,” or “ENSO”) don’t just operate in isolation. They’re part of the broader climate system, which means that climate change could theoretically change how they operate — make them develop more frequently, for example, or less frequently, or be more or less pronounced. Climate change could also intensify the effects of El Niño and La Niña events.

Climate scientists have been wrestling with the first question for a while now, and they still don’t really have a definitive answer. Some climate models have suggested that global warming has already begun to cause subtle changes in ENSO cycles, and that the changes will become more pronounced later this century. But a new study, published in the Journal of Climate, doesn’t find much evidence for that.

But on the second question, the new study is a lot more definitive. “Due to a warmer and moister atmosphere,” said co-author Baylor Fox-Kemper, of the University of Colorado in a press release, “the impacts of El Niño are changing even though El Niño itself doesn’t change.”

That’s because global warming has begun to change the playing field on which El Niño and La Niña operate, just as it’s changing the background conditions that give rise to our everyday weather. The Texas drought is a prime example. Its most likely cause is reduced rainfall from La Niña-related weather patterns. But however dry Texas and Oklahoma might have been otherwise, the killer heat wave that plagued the region this past summer — the sort of heat wave global warming is already making more commonplace — baked much of the remaining moisture out of both the soil and vegetation. No wonder large parts of the Lone Star State have gone up in smoke.

A map of sea surface temperature anomalies, showing a swath of cooler than average waters in the central and eastern tropical Pacific Ocean – a telltale sign La Niña conditions.

When the next El Niño occurs in a year or two, it will probably bring heavy rains to places like Southern California, whose unstable hillsides tend to slide when soggy. Except now, thanks to global warming, the typical El Niño-related storms that roll in off the Pacific may well be turbocharged, since a warmer atmosphere can hold more water. This is the reason, say many climate scientists, that downpours have become heavier in recent decades across broad geographical areas.

La Niña, plus the added moisture in the air from global warming, have also been partially implicated in the massive snowstorms that struck the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic states during the last two winters. Those could get worse as well, suggests the new analysis. “What we see,” says Fox-Kemper, “is that certain atmospheric patterns, such as the blocking high pressure south of Alaska typical of La Niña winters, strengthen…so, the cooling of North America expected in a La Niña winter would be stronger in future climates.” So to pre-answer the question that will inevitably be asked next winter: no, more snow does NOT contradict the idea that the planet is warming. Quite the contrary.

Finally, for those who really do want to know what El Niño and La Niña actually are, as opposed to what they do, you can go to NOAA’s El Niño page. But be warned: there will be a quiz, and the word “thermocline” will appear.

Comments

By Kirk Petersen (Maplewood, NJ 07040)
on October 13th, 2011

Seventh paragraph, third sentence should begin “Its most likely cause”—not “it’s”.

Vital Details of Global Warming Are Eluding Forecasters (Science)

27/10/2011Uncategorizedciência, Clima, Incerteza, Mediação tecnológica, Meteorologia, Mudanças climáticas, Previsãorenzotaddei

Science 14 October 2011:
Vol. 334 no. 6053 pp. 173-174
DOI: 10.1126/science.334.6053.173

PREDICTING CLIMATE CHANGE

Richard A. Kerr

Decision-makers need to know how to prepare for inevitable climate change, but climate researchers are still struggling to sharpen their fuzzy picture of what the future holds.

Seattle Public Utilities officials had a question for meteorologist Clifford Mass. They were planning to install a quarter-billion dollars’ worth of storm-drain pipes that would serve the city for up to 75 years. “Their question was, what diameter should the pipe be? How will the intensity of extreme precipitation change?” Mass says. If global warming means that the past century’s rain records are no guide to how heavy future rains will be, he was asked, what could climate modeling say about adapting to future climate change? “I told them I couldn’t give them an answer,” says the University of Washington (UW), Seattle, researcher.

Climate researchers are quite comfortable with their projections for the world under a strengthening greenhouse, at least on the broadest scales. Relying heavily on climate modeling, they find that on average the globe will continue warming, more at high northern latitudes than elsewhere. Precipitation will tend to increase at high latitudes and decrease at low latitudes.

But ask researchers what’s in store for the Seattle area, the Pacific Northwest, or even the western half of the United States, and they’ll often demur. As Mass notes, “there’s tremendous uncertainty here,” and he’s not just talking about the Pacific Northwest. Switching from global models to models focusing on a single region creates a more detailed forecast, but it also “piles uncertainty on top of uncertainty,” says meteorologist David Battisti of UW Seattle.

First of all, there are the uncertainties inherent in the regional model itself. Then there are the global model’s uncertainties at the regional scale, which it feeds into the regional model. As the saying goes, if the global model gives you garbage, regional modeling will only give you more detailed garbage. And still more uncertainties are created as data are transferred from the global to the regional model.

Although uncertainties abound, “uncertainty tends to be downplayed in a lot of [regional] modeling for adaptation,” says global modeler Christopher Bretherton of UW Seattle. But help is on the way. Regional modelers are well into their first extensive comparison of global-regional model combinations to sort out the uncertainties, although that won’t help Seattle’s storm-drain builders.

Most humble origins

Policymakers have long asked for regional forecasts to help them adapt to climate change, some of which is now unavoidable. Even immediate, rather drastic action to curb emissions of greenhouse gases would not likely limit warming globally to 2°C, generally considered the threshold above which “dangerous” effects set in. And nothing at all can be done to reduce the global warming effects expected in the next several decades. They are already locked into climate change.

Sharp but true? Feeding a global climate model’s prediction for midcentury (top) into a regional model gives more details (bottom), but modelers aren’t sure how accurate the details are. CREDIT: NORTH AMERICAN REGIONAL CLIMATE CHANGE ASSESSMENT PROGRAM

So scientists have been doing what they can for decision-makers. Early on, it wasn’t much. A U.S. government assessment released in 2000, Climate Change Impacts on the United States, relied on the most rudimentary regional forecasting technique (Science, 23 June 2000, p. 2113). Expert committee members divided the country into eight regions and then considered what two of their best global climate models had to say about each region over the next century. The two models were somewhat consistent in the far southwest, where the report’s authors found it was likely that warmer and drier conditions would eliminate alpine ecosystems and shorten the ski season.

But elsewhere, there was far less consistency. Over the eastern two-thirds of the contiguous 48 states, for example, the two models couldn’t agree on how much moisture soils would hold in the summer. Kansas corn would either suffer severe droughts more frequently, as one model had it, or enjoy even more moisture than it currently does, as the other indicated. But at least the uncertainties were plain for all to see.

The uncertainties of regional projections nearly faded from view in the next U.S. effort, Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States. The 2009 study drew on not two but 15 global models melded into single projections. In a technique called statistical downscaling, its authors assumed that local changes would be proportional to changes on the larger scales. And they adjusted regional projections of future climate according to how well model simulations of past climate matched actual climate.

Statistical downscaling yielded a broad warming across the lower 48 states with less warming across the southeast and up the West Coast. Precipitation was mostly down, especially in the southwest. But discussion of uncertainties in the modeling fell largely to a footnote (number 110), in which the authors cite a half-dozen papers to support their assertion that statistical downscaling techniques are “well-documented” and thoroughly corroborated.

The other sort of downscaling, known as dynamical downscaling or regional modeling, has yet to be fully incorporated into a U.S. national assessment. But an example of state-of-the-art regional modeling appeared 30 June in Environmental Research Letters. To investigate what will happen in the U.S. wine industry, regional modeler Noah Diffenbaugh of Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, and his colleagues embedded a detailed model that spanned the lower 48 states in a climate model that spanned the globe. The global model’s relatively fuzzy simulation of evolving climate from 1950 to 2039—calculated at points about 150 kilometers apart—then fed into the embedded regional model, which calculated a sharper picture of climate change at points only 25 kilometers apart.

Closely analyzing the regional model’s temperature projections on the West Coast, the group found that the projected warming would decrease the area suitable for production of premium wine grapes by 30% to 50% in parts of central and northern California. The loss in Washington state’s Columbia Valley would be more than 30%. But adaptation to the warming, such as the introduction of heat-tolerant varieties of grapes, could sharply reduce the losses in California and turn the Washington loss into a 150% gain.

Not so fast

A rapidly growing community of regional modelers is turning out increasingly detailed projections of future climate, but many researchers, mostly outside the downscaling community, have serious reservations. “Many regional modelers don’t do an adequate job of quantifying issues of uncertainty,” says Bretherton, who is chairing a National Academy of Sciences study committee on a national strategy for advancing climate modeling. “We’re not confident predicting the very things people are most interested in being predicted,” such as changes in precipitation.

Regional models produce strikingly detailed maps of changed climate, but they might be far off base. “The problem is that precision is often mistaken for accuracy,” Bretherton says. Battisti just doesn’t see the point of downscaling. “I would never use one of these products,” he says.

The problems start with the global models, as critics see it. Regional models must fill in the detail in the fuzzy picture of climate provided by global models, notes atmospheric scientist Edward Sarachik, professor emeritus at UW Seattle. But if the fuzzy picture of the region is wrong, the details will be wrong as well. And global models aren’t very good at painting regional pictures, he says. A glaring example, according to Sarachik, is the way global models place the cooler waters of the tropical Pacific farther west than they are in reality. Such ocean temperature differences drive weather and climate shifts in specific regions halfway around the world, but with the cold water in the wrong place, the global models drive climate change in the wrong regions.

Gregory Tripoli’s complaint about the global models is that they can’t create the medium-size weather systems that they should be sending into any embedded regional model. Tripoli, a meteorologist and modeler at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, cites the case of summertime weather disturbances that churn down off the Rocky Mountains and account for 80% of the Midwest’s summer rainfall. If a regional model forecasting for Wisconsin doesn’t extend to the Rockies, Wisconsin won’t get the major weather events that add up to be climate. And some atmospheric disturbances travel from as far away as Thailand to wreak havoc in the Midwest, he says, so they could never be included in the regional model.

A tougher nut. Predicting the details of precipitation using a regional model (bottom) fed by a global model (top) is even more uncertain than projecting regional temperature change. CREDIT: NORTH AMERICAN REGIONAL CLIMATE CHANGE ASSESSMENT PROGRAM

Even the things the global models get right have a hard time getting into regional models, critics say. “There are a lot of problems matching regional and global models,” Tripoli says. In one problem area, global and regional models usually have different ways of accounting for atmospheric processes such as individual cloud development that neither model can simulate directly, creating further clashes. Even the different philosophies involved in building global models and regional models can lead to mismatches that create phantom atmospheric circulations, Tripoli says. “It’s not straightforward you’re going to get anything realistic,” he says.

Redeeming regional modeling

“You could say all the global and regional models are wrong; some people do say that,” notes regional modeler Filippo Giorgi of the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics in Trieste, Italy. “My personal opinion is we do know something now. A few reports ago, it was really very, very difficult to say anything about regional climate change.”

But Giorgi says that in recent years he has been seeing increasingly consistent regional projections coming from combinations of many different models and from successive generations of models. “This means the projections are more and more reliable,” he says. “I would be confident saying the Mediterranean area will see a general decrease in precipitation in the next decades. I’ve seen this in several generations of models, and we understand the processes underlying this phenomenon. This is fairly reliable information, qualitatively. Saying whether the decrease will be 10% or 50% is a different issue.”

The skill of regional climate forecasting also varies from region to region and with what is being forecast. “Temperature is much, much easier” than precipitation, Giorgi notes. Precipitation depends on processes like atmospheric convection that operate on scales too small for any model to render in detail. Trouble simulating convection also means that higher-latitude climate is easier to project than that of the tropics, where convection dominates.

Regional modeling does have a clear advantage in areas with complex terrain such as mountainous regions, notes UW’s Mass, who does regional forecasting of both weather and climate. In the Pacific Northwest, the mountains running parallel to the coast direct onshore winds upward, predictably wringing rain and snow from the air without much difficult-to-simulate convection.

The downscaling of climate projections should be getting a boost as the Coordinated Regional Climate Downscaling Experiment (CORDEX) gets up to speed. Begun in 2009, CORDEX “is really the first time we’ll get a handle on all these uncertainties,” Giorgi says. Various groups will take on each of the world’s continent-size regions. Multiple global models will be matched with multiple regional models and run multiple times to tease out the uncertainties in each. “It’s a landmark for the regional climate modeling community,” Giorgi says.

Science 23 June 2000:
Vol. 288 no. 5474 p. 2113
DOI: 10.1126/science.288.5474.2113

GREENHOUSE WARMING

Dueling Models: Future U.S. Climate Uncertain

Richard A. Kerr

When Congress started funding a global climate change research program in 1990, it wanted to know what all this talk about greenhouse warming would mean for United States voters. Ten years later, a U.S. national assessment, drawing on the best available climate model predictions, concludes that the United States will indeed warm, affecting everything from the western snowpacks that supply California with water to New England’s fall foliage. But on a more detailed level, the assessment often draws a blank. Whether the cornfields of Kansas will be gripped by frequent, severe droughts, as one climate model has it, or blessed with more moisture than they now enjoy, as another predicts, the report can’t say. As much as policy-makers would like to know exactly what’s in store for Americans, the rudimentary state of regional climate science will not soon allow it, and the results of this 3-year effort brought the point home.

“This is the first time we’ve tried to take the physical [climate] system and see what effect it might have on ecosystems and socioeconomic systems,” says Thomas Karl, director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA’s) National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, North Carolina, and a co-chair of the committee of experts that pulled together the assessment report “Climate Change Impacts on the United States” (available at http://www.nacc.usgcrp.gov/). “We don’t say we know there’s going to be catastrophic drought in Kansas,” he says. “What we do say is, ‘Here’s the range of our uncertainties.’ This document should get people to think.” If anything is certain, Karl says, it’s that “the past isn’t going to be a very good guide to future climate.”

By chance, the assessment had a handy way to convey the range of uncertainty that regional modeling serves up. The report, which divides the country into eight regions, is based on a pair of state-of-the-art climate models—one from the Canadian Climate Center and one from the U.K. Hadley Center for Climate Research and Prediction—that couple a simulated atmosphere and ocean. The two models solved the problems of simplifying a complex world in different ways, leading to very different predicted U.S. climates. “In terms of temperature, the Canadian model is at the upper end of the warming by 2100” predicted by a range of models, says modeler Eric Barron of Pennsylvania State University, University Park, and a member of the assessment team. “The Hadley model is toward the lower end. The Canadian model is on the dry side, and the Hadley model is on the wet side. We’re capturing a substantial portion of the range of simulations. We tried hard to convey that uncertainty.”

On a broad scale, the report can conclude: “Overall productivity of American agriculture will likely remain high, and is projected to increase throughout the 21st century,” although there will be winners and losers from place to place, and adapting agricultural practice to climate change will be key. Where the models are somewhat consistent, as in the far southwest, the report ventures what could be construed as predictions: “It is likely that some ecosystems, such as alpine ecosystems, will disappear entirely from the region,” or “Higher temperatures are likely to mean … a shorter season for winter activities, such as skiing.” Where the models clash, as on summer soil moisture over the eastern two-thirds of the lower 48 states, it explains the alternatives and suggests ways to adapt, such as switching crops.

The range of possible climate impacts laid out by the models “fairly reflects where we are in the science,” says Karl. But he notes that the effort did lack one important input: Congress mandated the assessment without funding it. “You get what you pay for,” says climatologist Kevin Trenberth of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado. “A lot of it was done hastily.” Karl concedes that everyone involved would have liked to have had more funding delivered more reliably.

Even given more time and money, however, the assessment may not have come up with much better small-scale predictions, given the inherent limitations of the science. Even the best models today can say little that’s reliable about climate change at the regional level, never mind at the scale of a congressional district. Their picture of future climate is fuzzy—they might lump together San Francisco and Los Angeles because the models have such coarse geographic resolution—and the realism of such meteorological phenomena as clouds and precipitation is compromised by the inevitable simplifications of simulating the world in a computer.

“For the most part, these sorts of models give a warming,” says modeler Filippo Giorgi, “but they tend to give very different predictions, especially at the regional level, and there’s no way to say one should be believed over another.” Giorgi and his colleague Raquel Francisco of the Abdus Salam International Center for Theoretical Physics in Trieste, Italy, recently evaluated the uncertainties in five coupled climate models—including the two used in the national assessment—within 23 regions, the continental United States comprising roughly three regions. Giorgi concludes that as the scale of prediction shrinks, reliability drops until for small regions “the model data are not believable at all.”

Add in uncertainties external to the models, such as population and economic growth rates, says modeler Jerry D. Mahlman, director of NOAA’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory in Princeton, New Jersey, and the details of future climate recede toward unintelligibility. Some people in Congress and the policy community had “almost silly expectations there would be enormously useful, small-scale specifics, if you just got the right model. But the right model doesn’t exist,” says Mahlman.

Still, even though the national assessment does not offer the list of region-by-region impacts that Congress might have hoped for, it does show “where we are adaptable and where we are vulnerable,” says global change researcher Stephen Schneider of Stanford University. In 10 years, modelers say, they’ll do better.

The Post-Normal Seduction of Climate Science (Forbes)

27/10/2011Uncategorizedciência, Clima, comunicação científica, discurso ambiental, Economia, Enquadramento, Incerteza, Meteorologia, Mudanças climáticas, Previsão, Psicologiarenzotaddei

William Pentland, 10/14/2011 @ 12:22AM |2,770 views

In early 2002, former U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld explained why the lack of evidence linking Saddam Hussein with terrorist groups did not mean there was no connection during a televised press conference.

“[T]here are known ‘knowns’ – there are things we know we know,” said Rumsfeld. “We also know there are known ‘unknowns’ – that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown ‘unknowns’ – the ones we don’t know we don’t know . . . it is the latter category that tend to be the difficult ones.”

Rumsfeld turned out to be wrong about Hussein, but what if he had been talking about global warming? Well, he probably would have been on to something there. Unknowns of any ilk are a real pickle in climate science.

Indeed, uncertainty in climate science has induced a state of severe political paralysis. The trouble is that nobody really knows why. A rash of recent surveys and studies have exonerated most of the usual suspects – scientific illiteracy, industry distortions, skewed media coverage.

Now, the climate-science community is scrambling to crack the code on the “uncertainty” conundrum. Exhibit A: the October 2011 issue of the journal Climatic Change, the closest thing in climate science to gospel truth, which is devoted entirely to the subject of uncertainty.

While I have yet to digest all of the dozen or so essays, I suspect they are only the opening salvo in what is will soon become a robust debate about the significance of uncertainty in climate-change science. The first item up on the chopping block is called post-normal science (PNS).

PNS is a model of the scientific process pioneered by Jerome Ravetz and Silvio Funtowicz, which describes the peculiar challenges science encounters where “facts are uncertain, values in dispute, stakes high and decisions urgent.” Unlike “normal” science in the sense described by the philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn, post-normal science commonly crosses disciplinary lines and involves new methods, instruments and experimental systems.

Judith Curry, a professor at Georgia Tech, weighs the wisdom of taking the plunge on PNS in an excellent piece called “Reasoning about climate uncertainty.” Drawing on the work of Dutch wunderkind, Jeroen van der Sluijs, Curry calls on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to stop marginalizing uncertainty and get real about bias in the consensus building process. Curry writes:

The consensus approach being used by the IPCC has failed to produce a thorough portrayal of the complexities of the problem and the associated uncertainties in our understanding . . . Better characterization of uncertainty and ignorance and a more realistic portrayal of confidence levels could go a long way towards reducing the “noise” and animosity portrayed in the media that fuels the public distrust of climate science and acts to stymie the policy process.

PNS is especially seductive in the context of uncertainty. Not surprisingly, Curry suggests that instituting PNS-like strategies at the IPCC “could go a long way towards reducing the ‘noise’ and animosity” surrounding climate-change science.

While I personally believe PNS is persuasive, the PNS model provokes something closer to revulsion in many people. Last year, members of the U.S. House of Representatives filed a petition challenging the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency‘s Greenhouse Gas Endangerment seemed less sanguine about post-normal science:

. . . the conclusions of organizing bodies, especially the IPCC, cannot be said to reflect scientific “consensus” in any meaningful sense of that word. Instead, they reflect a political movement that has commandeered science to the service of its agenda. This is “post-normal science”: the long-dreaded arrival of deconstructionism to the natural sciences, according to which scientific quality is determined not by its fidelity to truth, but by its fidelity to the political agenda.

It seems unlikely that taking the PNS plunge would appreciably improve the U.S. public’s perception of the credibility, legitimacy and salience of climate-change assessments. This probably says more about Americans than it does about the analytic force of the PNS model.

Let’s face it. Americans do not agree on a whole hell of a lot. And they never have. Many U.S. institutions were deliberately designed to tolerate the coexistence of free states and slave-owning states. Ironically, Americans appear to agree more on climate-change science than other high-profile scientific controversies like the safety of genetically-modified organisms.

While it pains me to admit this, I am increasingly convinced that the IPCC’s role in assessing the science of climate change needs to be scaled back. The IPCC was an overly optimistic experiment in international governance designed for a world that never materialized. The U.N. General Assembly established the IPCC in the months immediately preceding the fall of the Berlin Wall. Only two few years later, the IPCC’s first assessment report and the creation of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change coincided with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War.

A new world order seemed to be dawning in those days, which is probably why it seemed like a good idea to ask scientists to tell us what constitutes “dangerous climate change.” Two decades and two world trade towers later, the world is a decidedly less hospitable place for institutions like the IPCC.

The proof is in the pudding – or, in this case, the atmosphere.

Climate Change Tumbles Down Europe’s Political Agenda as Economic Worries Take the Stage (N.Y. Times)

27/10/2011Uncategorizedciência, Clima, discurso ambiental, Economia, Incerteza, Meteorologia, Mudanças climáticas, Previsãorenzotaddei

By JEREMY LOVELL of ClimateWire. Published: October 13, 2011

LONDON — Climate change has all but fallen off the political agenda across Europe as the resurging economic crisis empties national coffers and shakes economic confidence, and the public and the press turn their attention to more immediate issues of rising fuels bills and joblessness, analysts say.

Sputtering economies, a shift of attention to looming elections and the prospect of little or no movement in the December climate talks in Durban, South Africa, have combined to take the political momentum out of an issue that was a major cause in Europe.

“It is way down the agenda and will not feature in elections,” said Edward Cameron, director of the World Resources Institute think tank’s international climate initiative, on the sidelines of a meeting on climate change at London’s Chatham House think tank. “At a time of joblessness and fiscal crises, it is very difficult to advance the climate change issue.”

That is as true for next year’s presidential elections in the United States as it will be in France, despite the fact that there has been a series of environmental disasters, from the Texas drought this year to Russia’s heat wave and consequent steep rise in wheat prices last year.

According to acclaimed NASA scientist James Hansen, who has been warning of impending climatic doom for decades, the lack of focus on these events is in no small part due to the fact that scientists are poor communicators while the climate change skeptics have mounted a smoothly run campaign to capitalize on any mistakes and admissions of uncertainty.

“There is a strong campaign by those people who want to continue the fossil fuel business as usual. Climate contrarians … have managed in the public’s eye to muddy the waters enough that there is uncertainty why should we do anything yet,” he said on a visit to London’s Royal Society for a meeting on lessons to be learned from past climate change battles.

“They have been winning the argument in the last several years, even though the science has become clearer,” he added.

Nuclear power issue distracts Berlin

In Germany, where a generous feed-in tariff scheme has produced some 28 gigawatts of wind power capacity and more than 18 GW of solar photovoltaic capacity, Chancellor Angela Merkel’s coalition government was forced into an abrupt U-turn on a controversial move to extend the lives of the country’s fleet of nuclear power plants. There was a political revolt after the March 11 nuclear disaster at Fukushima in Japan.

The oldest seven of Germany’s nuclear plants were closed immediately after Fukushima and will now never reopen, while the remainder will close by 2022.

This has had the perverse effect in a country proud of its renewable energy efforts of increasing the use of coal-fired power plants and increasing the likelihood of new coal- or gas-fired plants being built. The price tag will include higher carbon emissions at exactly the time that the Germany along with the rest of the European Union is pledged to cut emissions.

While political observers believe the climate change issue will come back to the fore at some point in Germany — a country where the Greens have played a pivotal political role — the nuclear power issue is so politically charged that it is off the agenda for now.

Even in the United Kingdom, which has a huge wind energy program and where the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition came to power 15 months ago pledging to be the “greenest government ever,” there are major signs of backsliding. A long-awaited energy bill has been shelved, and renewable energy support costs and carbon emission reduction targets are either under review or about to be.

At the Conservative Party’s annual conference earlier this month, climate change was consigned to a brief debate on the opening Sunday, when delegates were mostly just arriving and finding their way around or still traveling to get there.

Damned by faint praise in London

Prime Minister David Cameron did not mention the issue in his speech to the conference — a performance that usually sets the broad agenda for the following year — and Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne caused environmental outrage but satisfaction to the party’s right wing by pledging that the United Kingdom would not go any faster than its E.U. neighbors on emission cuts.

This is despite the fact that the United Kingdom has a legal target to cut its carbon emissions by at least 80 percent below 1990 levels by 2050, with cuts of 35 percent by 2022 and 50 percent by 2025, whereas the European Union’s goal is 20 percent by 2020.

It was widely reported that the 2022 target was only agreed to after a major battle in the Cabinet between supporters of Conservative Osborne and those of Liberal Democrat Energy and Climate Change Minister Chris Huhne. It has since been announced that the carbon targets will be reviewed in 2014.

Even in London, where charismatic Conservative Mayor Boris Johnson came to power in 2008 in part on a green ticket, the issue has largely been parked and replaced by transport in the run-up to next year’s mayoral elections. The city’s aging transport system is feared likely to come under massive strain during the 2012 Olympic Games.

Then there is the strange case of a strategic plan on adapting London to climate change, the draft of which was launched with great fanfare and declarations of urgency in February 2010. It was on the brink of publication in September 2010, but after that, it appeared to have vanished without trace.

At the same time, most members of City Hall’s climate change team, set up under the previous Labour administration, have been moved to other jobs.

‘Too difficult — and not a vote winner’

“Political leaders get it, but the treasuries don’t. The men with the money don’t want to be first movers,” said Nick Mabey, co-founder of environmental think tank E3G. “But the political froth has gone. It has become too difficult — and not a vote winner.”

Compounding that problem, at least in the United Kingdom, has been a series of reports underscoring the likely high cost to households of green energy policies at a time when the prices of domestic electricity and gas are already rising sharply.

A recent opinion poll found that the climate change issue has been replaced by concerns over rising fuel bills and energy security.

But Mabey is not too concerned. While the subject may be off the immediate political agenda, behind the scenes, the more enlightened corporate leaders and investment fund managers have been making their own calculations. They are moving their money into the low-carbon economic transformation that in some cases is already profitable and in many eyes essential and inevitable.

The main danger, they say, is that if climate change as a driver of action is allowed to languish too long and become too invisible while energy becomes the main motivator, it will become far harder to resurrect climate change.

For Mabey and WRI’s Cameron, while the deep and seemingly returning global economic crisis has proved a serious distraction internationally as well as domestically, all is not lost.

For a number of reasons, including the rise of a new and major climate player — China — and a series of new scientific reports on climate change due over the next two or three years, 2015 will be the next pivotal moment for the world to take collective action, they say.

“Climate change doesn’t keep people awake at night. Our task for the next few years is to move it back up the political agenda again,” said WRI’s Cameron.

Group Urges Research Into Aggressive Efforts to Fight Climate Change (N.Y. Times)

27/10/2011Uncategorizedciência, Clima, Incerteza, Meteorologia, Mudanças climáticas, Opinião pública, Política, Previsãorenzotaddei

By CORNELIA DEAN, Published: October 4, 2011

With political action on curbing greenhouse gases stalled, a bipartisan panel of scientists, former government officials and national security experts is recommending that the government begin researching a radical fix: directly manipulating the Earth’s climate to lower the temperature.

Members said they hoped that such extreme engineering techniques, which include scattering particles in the air to mimic the cooling effect of volcanoes or stationing orbiting mirrors in space to reflect sunlight, would never be needed. But in itsreport, to be released on Tuesday, the panel said it is time to begin researching and testing such ideas in case “the climate system reaches a ‘tipping point’ and swift remedial action is required.”

The 18-member panel was convened by the Bipartisan Policy Center, a research organization based in Washington founded by four senators — Democrats and Republicans — to offer policy advice to the government. In interviews, some of the panel members said they hoped that the mere discussion of such drastic steps would jolt the public and policy makers into meaningful action in reducing greenhouse gas emissions, which they called the highest priority.

The idea of engineering the planet is “fundamentally shocking,” David Keith, an energy expert at Harvard and the University of Calgary and a member of the panel, said. “It should be shocking.”

In fact, it is an idea that many environmental groups have rejected as misguided and potentially dangerous.

Jane Long, an associate director of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and the panel’s co-chairwoman, said that by spewing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, human activity was already engaged in climate modification. “We are doing it accidentally, but the Earth doesn’t know that,” she said, adding, “Going forward in ignorance is not an option.”

The panel, the Task Force on Climate Remediation Research, suggests that the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy begin coordinating research and estimates that a valuable effort could begin with a few million dollars in financing over the next few years.

One reason that the United States should embrace such research, the report suggests, is the threat of unilateral action by another country. Members say research is already under way in Britain, Germany and possibly other countries, as well as in the private sector.

“A conversation about this is going to go on with us or without us,” said David Goldston, a panel member who directs government affairs at the Natural Resources Defense Counciland is a former chief of staff of the House Committee on Science. “We have to understand what is at stake.”

In interviews, panelists said again and again that the continuing focus of policy makers and experts should be on reducing emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. But several acknowledged that significant action remained a political nonstarter. Last month, for example, the Obama administration told the federal Environmental Protection Agency to hold off on tightening ozone standards, citing complications related to the weak economy.

According to the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, greenhouse gas emissions have contributed to raising the global average surface temperatures by about 1.3 degrees Fahrenheit in the past 100 years. It is impossible to predict how much impact the report will have. But given the panelists’ varied political and professional backgrounds, they seem likely to achieve one major goal: starting a broader conversation on the issue. Some climate experts have been working on it for years, but they have largely kept their discussions to themselves, saying they feared giving the impression that there might be quick fixes for climate change.

“Climate adaptation went through the same period of concern,” Mr. Goldston said, referring to the onetime reluctance of some researchers to discuss ways in which people, plants and animals might adjust to climate change. Now, he said, similar reluctance to discuss geoengineering is giving way, at least in part because “it’s possible we may have to do this no matter what.”

Although the techniques, which fall into two broad groups, are more widely known as geoengineering, the panel prefers “climate remediation.”

The first is carbon dioxide removal, in which the gas is absorbed by plants, trapped and stored underground or otherwise removed from the atmosphere. The methods are “generally uncontroversial and don’t introduce new global risks,” said Ken Caldeira, a climate expert at Stanford University and a panel member. “It’s mostly a question of how much do these things cost.”

Controversy arises more with the second group of techniques, solar radiation management, which involves increasing the amount of solar energy that bounces back into space before it can be absorbed by the Earth. They include seeding the atmosphere with reflective particles, launching giant mirrors above the earth or spewing ocean water into the air to form clouds.

These techniques are thought to pose a risk of upsetting earth’s natural rhythms. With them, Dr. Caldeira said, “the real question is what are the unknown unknowns: Are you creating more risk than you are alleviating?”

At the influential blog Climate Progress, Joe Romm, a fellow at the Center for American Progress, has made a similar point, likening geo-engineering to a dangerous course of chemotherapy and radiation to treat a condition curable through diet and exercise — or, in this case, emissions reduction.

The panel rejected any immediate application of climate remediation techniques, saying too little is known about them. In 2009, the Royal Society in Britain said much the same, assessing geoengineering technologies as “technically feasible” but adding that their potential costs, effectiveness and risks were unknown.

Similarly, in a 2010 review of federal research that might be relevant to climate remediation, the federal Government Accountability Office noted that “major uncertainties remain on the efficacy and potential consequences” of the approach. Its report also recommended that the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy “establish a clear strategy for geoengineering research.”

John P. Holdren, who heads that office, declined interview requests. He issued a statement reiterating the Obama administration’s focus on “taking steps to sensibly reduce pollution that is contributing to climate change.”

Yet in an interview with The Associated Press in 2009, Dr. Holdren said the possible risks and benefits of geoengineering should be studied very carefully because “we might get desperate enough to want to use it.”

In a draft plan made public on Friday, the U.S. Global Change Research Program, a coordinating effort administered by his office, outlined its own climate change research agenda, including studies of the impacts of rapid climate change.

The plan said that climate-related projections would be crucial to future studies of the “feasibility, effectiveness and unintended consequences of strategies for deliberate, large-scale manipulations of Earth’s environment,” including carbon dioxide removal and solar radiation management.

Many countries fault the United States for government inaction on climate change, especially given its longtime role as a chief contributor to the problem.

Frank Loy, a panelist and former chief climate negotiator for the United States, suggested that people around the world would see past those issues if the United States embraced geoengineering studies, provided that it was “very clear about what kind of research is undertaken and what the safeguards are.”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: October 4, 2011

An earlier version of this article mistakenly referred to Frank Loy as the nation’s chief climate negotiator; he is a former chief climate negotiator. It also misstated the name of a federal agency that reported on the potential effectiveness of climate remediation. It is the Government Accountability Office, not the General Accountability Office.

Little Ice Age Shrank Europeans, Sparked Wars (NetGeo)

27/10/2011Uncategorizedambientalismo, ciência, Cultura, discurso ambiental, Economia, História, Incerteza, Meteorologia, Mudanças climáticas, Violênciarenzotaddei

Study aims to scientifically link climate change to societal upheaval.

London’s River Thames, frozen over in 1677. Painting by Abraham Hondius via Heritage Images/Corbis

Brian Handwerk, for National Geographic News

Published October 3, 2011

Pockmarked with wars, inflation, famines and shrinking humans, the 1600s in Europe came to be called the General Crisis.

But whereas historians have blamed those tumultuous decades on growing pains between feudalism and capitalism, a new study points to another culprit: the coldest stretch of the climate change period known as the Little Ice Age.

(Also see “Sun Oddly Quiet—Hints at Next ‘Little Ice Age’?”)

The Little Ice Age curbed agricultural production and eventually led to the European crisis, according to the authors of the study—said to be the first to scientifically verify cause-and-effect between climate change and large-scale human crises.

Prior to the industrial revolution, all European countries were by and large agrarian, and as study co-author David Zhang pointed out, “In agricultural societies, the economy is controlled by climate,” since it dictates growing conditions.

A team led by Zhang, of the University of Hong Kong, pored over data from Europe and other the Northern Hemisphere regions between A.D. 1500 to 1800.

The team compared climate data, such as temperatures, with other variables, including population sizes, growth rates, wars and other social disturbances, agricultural production figures and famines, grain prices, and wages.

The authors say some effects, such as food shortages and health problems, showed up almost immediately between 1560 and 1660—the Little Ice Age’s harshest period—during which growing seasons shortened and cultivated land shrank.

As arable land contracted, so too did Europeans themselves, the study notes. Average height followed the temperature line, dipping nearly an inch (two centimeters) during the late 1500s, as malnourishment spread, and rising again only as temperatures climbed after 1650, the authors found.

Others effects—such as famines, the Thirty Years’ War (1618-48), or the 164 Manchu conquest of China—took decades to manifest. “Temperature is not a direct cause of war and social disturbance,” Zhang said. “The direct cause of war and social disturbance is the grain price. That is why we say climate change is the ultimate cause.”

The new study is both history lesson and warning, the researchers added.

As our climate changes due to global warming (see interactive), Zhang said, “developing countries will suffer more, because large populations in these countries [directly] rely on agricultural production.”

More: “Climate Change Killed Neanderthals, Study Says” >>

The scientific finding that settles the climate-change debate (Washington Post)

26/10/2011UncategorizedClima, Incerteza, jornalismo, Mídia, Meteorologia, Mudanças climáticas, Opinião pública, Política, Previsãorenzotaddei

By Eugene Robinson, Published: October 24

For the clueless or cynical diehards who deny global warming, it’s getting awfully cold out there.

The latest icy blast of reality comes from an eminent scientist whom the climate-change skeptics once lauded as one of their own. Richard Muller, a respected physicist at the University of California, Berkeley, used to dismiss alarmist climate research as being “polluted by political and activist frenzy.” Frustrated at what he considered shoddy science, Muller launched his own comprehensive study to set the record straight. Instead, the record set him straight.

“Global warming is real,” Muller wrote last week in The Wall Street Journal.

Rick Perry, Herman Cain, Michele Bachmann and the rest of the neo-Luddites who are turning the GOP into the anti-science party should pay attention.

“When we began our study, we felt that skeptics had raised legitimate issues, and we didn’t know what we’d find,” Muller wrote. “Our results turned out to be close to those published by prior groups. We think that means that those groups had truly been careful in their work, despite their inability to convince some skeptics of that.”

In other words, the deniers’ claims about the alleged sloppiness or fraudulence of climate science are wrong. Muller’s team, the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project, rigorously explored the specific objections raised by skeptics — and found them groundless.

Muller and his fellow researchers examined an enormous data set of observed temperatures from monitoring stations around the world and concluded that the average land temperature has risen 1 degree Celsius — or about 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit — since the mid-1950s.

This agrees with the increase estimated by the United Nations-sponsored Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Muller’s figures also conform with the estimates of those British and American researchers whose catty e-mails were the basis for the alleged “Climategate” scandal, which was never a scandal in the first place.

The Berkeley group’s research even confirms the infamous “hockey stick” graph — showing a sharp recent temperature rise — that Muller once snarkily called “the poster child of the global warming community.” Muller’s new graph isn’t just similar, it’s identical.

Muller found that skeptics are wrong when they claim that a “heat island” effect from urbanization is skewing average temperature readings; monitoring instruments in rural areas show rapid warming, too. He found that skeptics are wrong to base their arguments on the fact that records from some sites seem to indicate a cooling trend, since records from at least twice as many sites clearly indicate warming. And he found that skeptics are wrong to accuse climate scientists of cherry-picking the data, since the readings that are often omitted — because they are judged unreliable — show the same warming trend.

Muller and his colleagues examined five times as many temperature readings as did other researchers — a total of 1.6 billion records — and now have put that merged database online. The results have not yet been subjected to peer review, so technically they are still preliminary. But Muller’s plain-spoken admonition that “you should not be a skeptic, at least not any longer” has reduced many deniers to incoherent grumbling or stunned silence.

Not so, I predict, with the blowhards such as Perry, Cain and Bachmann, who, out of ignorance or perceived self-interest, are willing to play politics with the Earth’s future. They may concede that warming is taking place, but they call it a natural phenomenon and deny that human activity is the cause.

It is true that Muller made no attempt to ascertain “how much of the warming is due to humans.” Still, the Berkeley group’s work should help lead all but the dimmest policymakers to the overwhelmingly probable answer.

We know that the rise in temperatures over the past five decades is abrupt and very large. We know it is consistent with models developed by other climate researchers that posit greenhouse gas emissions — the burning of fossil fuels by humans — as the cause. And now we know, thanks to Muller, that those other scientists have been both careful and honorable in their work.

Nobody’s fudging the numbers. Nobody’s manipulating data to win research grants, as Perry claims, or making an undue fuss over a “naturally occurring” warm-up, as Bachmann alleges. Contrary to what Cain says, the science is real.

It is the know-nothing politicians — not scientists — who are committing an unforgivable fraud.

Bleak Prospects for Avoiding Dangerous Global Warming (Science)

24/10/2011Uncategorizedciência, Clima, Incerteza, Meteorologia, Mudanças climáticas, Previsãorenzotaddei

by Richard A. Kerr on 23 October 2011, 1:00 PM

The bad news just got worse: A new study finds that reining in greenhouse gas emissions in time to avert serious changes to Earth’s climate will be at best extremely difficult. Current goals for reducing emissions fall far short of what would be needed to keep warming below dangerous levels, the study suggests. To succeed, we would most likely have to reverse the rise in emissions immediately and follow through with steep reductions through the century. Starting later would be far more expensive and require unproven technology.

Published online today in Nature Climate Change, the new study merges model estimates of how much greenhouse gas society might put into the atmosphere by the end of the century with calculations of how climate might respond to those human emissions. Climate scientist Joeri Rogelj of ETH Zurich and his colleagues combed the published literature for model simulations that keep global warming below 2°C at the lowest cost. They found 193 examples. Modelers running such optimal-cost simulations tried to include every factor that might influence the amount of greenhouse gases society will produce —including the rate of technological progress in burning fuels efficiently, the amount of fossil fuels available, and the development of renewable fuels. The researchers then fed the full range of emissions from the scenarios into a simple climate model to estimate the odds of avoiding a dangerous warming.

The results suggest challenging times ahead for decision makers hoping to curb the greenhouse. Strategies that are both plausible and likely to succeed call for emissions to peak this decade and start dropping right away. They should be well into decline by 2020 and far less than half of current emissions by 2050. Only three of the 193 scenarios examined would be very likely to keep the warming below the danger level, and all of those require heavy use of energy systems that actually remove greenhouse gases from the atmosphere. That would require, for example, both creating biofuels and storing the carbon dioxide from their combustion in the ground.

“The alarming thing is very few scenarios give the kind of future we want,” says climate scientist Neil Edwards of The Open University in Milton Keynes, U.K. Both he and Rogelj emphasize the uncertainties inherent in the modeling, especially on the social and technological side, but the message seems clear to Edwards: “What we need is at the cutting edge. We need to be as innovative as we can be in every way.” And even then, success is far from guaranteed.

A skeptical physicist ends up confirming climate data (Washington Post)

24/10/2011UncategorizedClima, Incerteza, Mediação tecnológica, Meteorologia, Mudanças climáticas, Opinião pública, Política, Previsão, Visualidaderenzotaddei

Posted by Brad Plumer at 04:18 PM ET, 10/20/2011
Back in 2010, Richard Muller, a Berkeley physicist and self-proclaimed climate skeptic, decided to launch the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature (BEST) project to review the temperature data that underpinned global-warming claims. Remember, this was not long after the Climategate affair had erupted, at a time when skeptics were griping that climatologists had based their claims on faulty temperature data.(Jonathan Hayward/AP)Muller’s stated aims were simple. He and his team would scour and re-analyze the climate data, putting all their calculations and methods online. Skeptics cheered the effort. “I’m prepared to accept whatever result they produce, even if it proves my premise wrong,” wrote Anthony Watts, a blogger who has criticized the quality of the weather stations in the United Statse that provide temperature data. The Charles G. Koch Foundation even gave Muller’s project $150,000 — and the Koch brothers, recall, are hardly fans of mainstream climate science.So what are the end results? Muller’s team appears to have confirmed the basic tenets of climate science. Back in March, Muller told the House Science and Technology Committee that, contrary to what he expected, the existing temperature data was “excellent.” He went on: “We see a global warming trend that is very similar to that previously reported by the other groups.” And, today, the BEST team has released a flurry of new papers that confirm that the planet is getting hotter. As the team’s two-page summary flatly concludes, “Global warming is real.”Here’s a chart comparing their findings with existing data:

The BEST team tried to take a number of skeptic claims seriously, to see if they panned out. Take, for instance, their paper on the “urban heat island effect.” Watts has long argued that many weather stations collecting temperature data could be biased by being located in cities. Since cities are naturally warmer than rural areas (because building materials retain more heat), the uptick in recorded temperatures might be exaggerated, an illusion spawned by increased urbanization. So Muller’s team decided to compare overall temperature trends with only those weather stations based in rural areas. And, as it turns out the trends match up well. “Urban warming does not unduly bias estimates of recent global temperature change,” Muller’s group concluded.

That shouldn’t be so jaw-dropping. Previous analyses — like this one from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration — have responded to Watts’ concerns by showing that a few flawed stations don’t warp the overall trend. But maybe Muller’s team can finally put this controversy to rest, right? Well, not yet. As Watts responds over at his site, the BEST papers still haven’t been peer-reviewed (an important caveat, to be sure). And Watts isn’t pleased with how much pre-publication hype the studies are getting. But so far, what we have is a prominent skeptic casting a critical eye at the data and finding, much to his own surprise, that the data holds up.

Estudo americano confirma aquecimento da superfície terrestre (BBC)

22/10/2011Uncategorizedciência, Clima, Enquadramento, Incerteza, Mediação tecnológica, Meteorologia, Mudanças climáticas, Opinião pública, Política, Previsãorenzotaddei

Richard Black

Da BBC News

Estação meteorológica próxima de aeroporto.

Grupo afirma que estações meteorológicas dão dados precisos sobre aquecimento

Uma nova análise de um grupo de cientistas dos Estados Unidos concluiu que a superfície da Terra está ficando mais quente.

Desde 1950, a temperatura média em terra aumentou em um grau centígrado, segundo as descobertas do grupo Berkeley Earth Project.

O Berkeley Earth Project usou novos métodos e novos dados, mas as descobertas do grupo seguem a mesma tendência climática vista pela Nasa e pelo Escritório de Meteorologia da Grã-Bretanha, por exemplo.

“Nossa maior surpresa foi que os novos resultados concordam com os valores de aquecimento publicados anteriormente por outras equipes nos Estados Unidos e Grã-Bretanha”, afirmou o professor Richard Muller, que estabeleceu o Berkeley Earth Project na Universidade da Califórnia reunindo dez cientistas renomados.

“Isto confirma que estes estudos foram feitos cuidadosamente e que o potencial de (estudos) tendenciosos, identificados pelos céticos em relação ao aquecimento global, não afetam seriamente as conclusões”, acrescentou.

O grupo de cientistas também relata que, apesar de o efeito de aumento de calor perto de cidades – o chamado efeito de ilha de calor urbana – ser real e já ter sido estabelecido, ele não é o responsável pelo aquecimento registrado pela maioria das estações climáticas no mundo todo.

Ceticismo

O grupo examinou as alegações de blogueiros “céticos” em relação ao fenômeno, que afirmam que os dados de estações meteorológicas não mostram uma tendência verdadeira de aquecimento global.

Eles dizem que muitas estações meteorológicas registraram aquecimento pois estão localizadas perto de cidades e as cidades crescem, aumentando o calor.

No entanto, o grupo de cientistas descobriu cerca de 40 mil estações meteorológicas no mundo todo cujas informações foram gravadas e armazenadas no formato digital.

Os pesquisadores então desenvolveram uma nova forma de analisar os dados para detectar a tendência das temperaturas globais em terra desde 1800.

O resultado foi um gráfico muito parecido com aqueles produzidos pelos grupos mais importantes do mundo, que tiveram seus trabalhos criticados pelos céticos.

Dois destes três registros são mantidos pelos Estados Unidos, na Administração Oceânica e Atmosférica Nacional (NOAA) e na Nasa. O terceiro é uma colaboração entre o Escritório de Meteorologia da Grã-Bretanha e o Centro de Pesquisa Climática da Universidade de East Anglia (UEA).

O professor Phil Jones, do Centro de Pesquisa Climática da UEA, encarou o trabalho do grupo com cautela e afirmou que espera ler “o relatório final”, quando for publicado.

“Estas descobertas iniciais são muito encorajadoras e ecoam nossos resultados e nossa conclusão de que o impacto das ilhas urbanas de calor na média global de temperatura é mínimo”, disse.

Trânsito e fumaça em rua da China (Reuters)

Céticos dizem que proximidade de cidades alteram dados de estações

Phil Jones foi um dos cientistas britânicos acusados de manipular dados para exagerar a influência humana no aquecimento global. Os cientistas foram inocentados em 2010.

O caso teve início em 2009, com o vazamento de e-mails de Jones nos quais o cientista parecia sugerir que alguns dados de pesquisas sobre o aquecimento global fossem excluídos de apresentações que seriam realizadas na conferência da ONU sobre mudanças climáticas.

O episódio deu munição aos céticos em relação ao papel dos seres humanos nas alterações climáticas. Mas a sindicância da Universidade de East Anglia concluiu que não havia dúvidas sobre o rigor e a honestidade dos cientistas.

Sem publicação

Bob Ward, diretor de política e comunicações para o Instituto Graham de Mudança Climática e Meio Ambiente, de Londres, afirmou que o aquecimento global é claro.

“Os chamados céticos devem deixar de lado sua alegações de que o aumento na temperatura média global pode ser atribuído ao impacto do crescimento das cidades”, disse.

A equipe do Berkeley Earth Project decidiu divulgar os dados de suas pesquisas inicialmente em seu próprio website, ao invés de fazê-lo em uma publicação especializada.

Os pesquisadores estão pedindo para que os internautas comentem e forneçam suas opiniões antes de preparar os manuscritos para a publicação científica formal.

Richard Muller, que criou o grupo de pesquisa, afirmou que esta livre circulação de informações marca uma volta à forma como a ciência precisa ser feita, ao invés de apenas publicar o estudo em revistas científicas.

Rick Perry officials spark revolt after doctoring environment report (The Guardian)

17/10/2011Uncategorizedciência, Clima, Conservadorismo, Enquadramento, Incerteza, Mudanças climáticas, Opinião pública, Poder, Política, Previsãorenzotaddei

Scientists ask for names to be removed after mentions of climate change and sea-level rise taken out by Texas officials

Suzanne Goldenberg, US environment correspondent
guardian.co.uk, Friday 14 October 2011 13.05 BST

Republican presidential hopeful Texas Gov. Rick Perry

Rick Perry’s administration deleted references to climate change and sea-level rise from the report. Photograph: Evan Vucci/AP

Officials in Rick Perry’s home state of Texas have set off a scientists’ revolt after purging mentions of climate change and sea-level rise from what was supposed to be a landmark environmental report. The scientists said they were disowning the report on the state of Galveston Bay because of political interference and censorship from Perry appointees at the state’s environmental agency.

By academic standards, the protest amounts to the beginnings of a rebellion: every single scientist associated with the 200-page report has demanded their names be struck from the document. “None of us can be party to scientific censorship so we would all have our names removed,” said Jim Lester, a co-author of the report and vice-president of the Houston Advanced Research Centre.

“To me it is simply a question of maintaining scientific credibility. This is simply antithetical to what a scientist does,” Lester said. “We can’t be censored.” Scientists see Texas as at high risk because of climate change, from the increased exposure to hurricanes and extreme weather on its long coastline to this summer’s season of wildfires and drought.

However, Perry, in his run for the Republican nomination, has elevated denial of science, from climate change to evolution, to an art form. He opposes any regulation of industry, and has repeatedly challenged the authority of the Environmental Protection Agency.

Texas is the only state to refuse to sign on to the federal government’s new regulations on greenhouse gas emissions. “I like to tell people we live in a state of denial in the state of Texas,” said John Anderson, an oceanography at Rice University, and author of the chapter targeted by the government censors.

That state of denial percolated down to the leadership of the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality. The agency chief, who was appointed by Perry, is known to doubt the science of climate change. “The current chair of the commission, Bryan Shaw, commonly talks about how human-induced climate change is a hoax,” said Anderson.

But scientists said they still hoped to avoid a clash by simply avoiding direct reference to human causes of climate change and by sticking to materials from peer-reviewed journals. However, that plan began to unravel when officials from the agency made numerous unauthorised changes to Anderson’s chapter, deleting references to climate change, sea-level rise and wetlands destruction.

“It is basically saying that the state of Texas doesn’t accept science results published in Science magazine,” Anderson said. “That’s going pretty far.”

Officials even deleted a reference to the sea level at Galveston Bay rising five times faster than the long-term average – 3mm a year compared to .5mm a year – which Anderson noted was a scientific fact. “They just simply went through and summarily struck out any reference to climate change, any reference to sea level rise, any reference to human influence – it was edited or eliminated,” said Anderson. “That’s not scientific review that’s just straight forward censorship.”

Mother Jones has tracked the changes. The agency has defended its actions. “It would be irresponsible to take whatever is sent to us and publish it,” Andrea Morrow, a spokeswoman said in an emailed statement. “Information was included in a report that we disagree with.”

She said Anderson’s report had been “inconsistent with current agency policy”, and that he had refused to change it. She refused to answer any questions. Campaigners said the censorship by the Texas state authorities was a throwback to the George Bush era when White House officials also interfered with scientific reports on climate change.

In the last few years, however, such politicisation of science has spread to the states. In the most notorious case, Virginia’s attorney general Ken Cuccinelli, who is a professed doubter of climate science, has spent a year investigating grants made to a prominent climate scientist Michael Mann, when he was at a state university in Virginia.

Several courts have rejected Cuccinelli’s demands for a subpoena for the emails. In Utah, meanwhile, Mike Noel, a Republican member of the Utah state legislature called on the state university to sack a physicist who had criticised climate science doubters.

The university rejected Noel’s demand, but the physicist, Robert Davies said such actions had had a chilling effect on the state of climate science. “We do have very accomplished scientists in this state who are quite fearful of retribution from lawmakers, and who consequently refuse to speak up on this very important topic. And the loser is the public,” Davies said in an email.

“By employing these intimidation tactics, these policymakers are, in fact, successful in censoring the message coming from the very institutions whose expertise we need.”

Expedição no Amazonas vai divulgar astronomia indígena na Semana Nacional de C&T (Jornal A Crítica, de Manaus)

17/10/2011UncategorizedAntropologia, Astronomia, Índios, Calendário, Clima, Conhecimento tradicional, Cultura, Memória, Meteorologia, Mudanças climáticasrenzotaddei

JC e-mail 4365, de 17 de Outubro de 2011.

Calendário indígena do povo dessana associa constelações às mudanças do clima e ao ecossistema amazônico.

Surucucu não é apenas a mais perigosa serpente da Amazônia. Para os povos indígenas da etnia dessana, também é uma das inúmeras constelações que os ajudam a identificar o ciclo dos rios, o período da piracema, a formação de chuvas e sugere o momento ideal para a realização de rituais.

Na astronomia indígena, outubro é o mês do desaparecimento da constelação surucucu (añá em língua dessana) no horizonte oeste – o equivalente a escorpião na astronomia ocidental. O desaparecimento da figura da cobra está associado ao fim do período da vazante. Os dessana têm outras 13 constelações, sempre associadas às alterações climáticas.

Para divulgar a respeito da pouco conhecida astronomia indígena, um grupo de estudiosos promoverá no próximo dia 19 uma expedição de dois dias a uma aldeia da etnia dessana localizada na Reserva de Desenvolvimento Sustentável Tupé, em Manaus.

Expedição – A comunidade é composta por famílias dessana que se deslocaram da região do alto Rio Negro, no Norte do Amazonas, e ressignificaram suas tradições, cosmologias e rituais na comunidade onde se estabeleceram na zona rural de Manaus. O astrônomo Germano Afonso, do Museu da Amazônia (Musa), que desenvolve há 20 anos estudo sobre constelações indígenas no país, coordenará a expedição. Com os dessana, o trabalho de Germano Afonso é desenvolvimento há dois anos.

Ele descreve a programação como um “diálogo” entre a astronomia indígena e o conhecimento científico. “Será um diálogo entre os dois conhecimentos. Vamos escutar os indígenas e ao mesmo tempo levar uma pequena estação meteorológica que mede temperatura e velocidade. A ciência observa com equipamentos, o indígena vê isso empiricamente”, explicou.

Uma embarcação da Secretaria Municipal de Educação (Semed) levará as pessoas interessadas em participar da experiência. “Vamos fazer atividades de astronomia, meteorologia e química com os indígenas. Será uma atividade integrada à Semana de Ciência e Tecnologia”, explica Afonso.

O traço identificado como surucuru pelos indígenas é mais visível por volta de 19h, pelo lado oeste. Depois da surucuru, é a vez do tatu – outra espécie comum na fauna amazônica.

Desastres – Germano Afonso conta que os povos indígenas observam o céu, a lua, as constelações e sabem exatamente qual a época ideal para fazer o roçado, para se prevenir de uma cheia ou de uma seca. Também sabem qual o momento ideal para realizar um ritual.

A diferença em relação ao conhecimento científico, ocidental, é que não utilizam equipamentos e tecnologia para prever alterações do tempo e mudanças do clima. Mas há uma diferença mais significativa: os indígenas não caem vítimas de desmoronamentos, de grandes cheias ou de uma vazante extraordinária.

“Quem tem mais cuidado com o meio ambiente e evitar os desastres ambientais? Os índios sabem exatamente quando vai cair uma chuva forte e teremos uma grande enchente. Mas eles não morrem por causa disso”, destaca Afonso, que tem ascendência indígena guarani.

Secitece promove I Fórum “Ceará Faz Ciência” (Funcap)

15/10/2011UncategorizedCeará, Clima, Desastre, discurso ambiental, Incerteza, Marketing, Meteorologia, Mudanças climáticas, Opinião pública, Política, Previsão, Visualidaderenzotaddei

POR ADMIN, EM 13/10/2011

Com a Assessoria de Comunicação da Secitece

O evento será realizado nos dias 17 e 18 de outubro, no auditório do Planetário do Centro Dragão do Mar de Arte e Cultura.

Nos dias 17 e 18 de outubro, a Secretaria da Ciência Tecnologia e Educação Superior (Secitece), realizará o “I Fórum Ceará Faz Ciência”, com o tema” Mudanças climáticas, desastres naturais e prevenção de riscos”. A iniciativa integra a programação estadual da Semana Nacional de Ciência e Tecnologia.

O secretário da Ciência e Tecnologia, René Barreira, fará a abertura do evento, dia 17, às 17h, no auditório do Planetário Rubens de Azevedo. Na ocasião, será prestada homenagem ao pesquisador cearense Expedito Parente, conhecido como o pai do biodiesel, que faleceu em setembro.

No dia 18, partir das 9h, as atividades serão retomadas com as seguintes palestras: “Onda gigante no litoral brasileiro. É possível?”, com o prof. Francisco Brandão, chefe do Laboratório de Sismologia da Coordenadoria Estadual de Defesa Civil, e “As quatro estações do ano no Ceará: perceba suas interferências na fisiologia e no meio ambiente”, ministrada por Dermeval Carneiro, prof. de Física e Astronomia, presidente da Sociedade Brasileira dos Amigos da Astronomia e diretor do Planetário Rubens de Azevedo – Dragão do Mar.

No período da tarde, a partir das 14h30, será a vez da palestra “Desastres Naturais: como prevenir e atuar em situações de risco”, com o Tenente Coronel Leandro Silva Nogueira, secretário Executivo da Coordenadoria Estadual de Defesa Civil. Para finalizar o Fórum, a engenheira agrônoma do Departamento de Recursos Hidricos e Meio Ambiente da Fundação Cearense de Meteorologia e Recursos Hídricos (Funceme), Sonia Barreto Perdigão, ministrará palestra sobre “Mudanças Climáticas e Desertificação no Ceará”, às 16h30.

Os interessados em participar do I Fórum “Ceará Faz Ciência”, a ser realizado nos dias 17 e 18/10, no Dragão do Mar, em Fortaleza, devem fazer sua pré-inscrição. O formulário a ser preenchido está disponível no site da Secitece. A participação é gratuita.

Serviço
I Fórum Ceará Faz Ciência
Data: 17 e 18 de outubro de 2011
Local: Auditório do Planetário Rubens de Azevedo
Informações: (85) 3101-6466
Inscrições gratuitas.

O tempo da meteorologia (Tome Ciência)

10/10/2011Uncategorizedciência, Clima, comunicação científica, Incerteza, Meteorologia, Mudanças climáticas, Previsãorenzotaddei

A meteorologia é muito mais do que dar uma olhada na previsão do tempo quando se planeja uma viagem de fim de semana. No momento em que o aquecimento global é uma ameaça, e as grandes catástrofes climáticas tornam-se cada vez mais frequentes, ressalta-se a importância e a responsabilidade dos meteorologistas. O aumento do conhecimento e as inovações tecnológicas nessa área permitem hoje prever com certa antecedência e precisão os fenômenos do clima. E retirar rapidamente pessoas de áreas de risco pode salvar muitas vidas. O tema deste debate foi sugerido pela Sociedade Brasileira de Meteorologia, instituição vinculada à Sociedade Brasileira para o Progresso da Ciência – a SBPC.

Participantes:

Carlos Afonso Nobre, secretário de Políticas e Programas de Pesquisa e Desenvolvimento do Ministério da Ciência e Tecnologia (MCT), dirigiu por mais de 10 anos o Centro de Previsão de Tempo e Estudos Climáticos do Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas Espaciais (INPE) e participa da criação, em 2011, do Centro Nacional de Monitoramento e Alerta de Desastres Naturais.

Maria Gertrudes Justi da Silva, coordenadora do curso de meteorologia da Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ). Ex-presidente da Sociedade Brasileira de Meteorologia faz parte do Conselho de Coordenação das Atividades de Meteorologia, Climatologia e Hidrologia no Governo Federal.

José Marques é o presidente do Conselho Deliberativo da Sociedade Brasileira de Meteorologia. Foi da primeira turma de meteorologistas formados em universidade brasileira, graduado em 1967 pela UFRJ. Até então os cursos eram só no exterior, onde depois, na França, ele fez o pós-doutorado.

Ednaldo Oliveira dos Santos, professor adjunto do Departamento de Ciências Ambientais do Instituto de Florestas da Universidade Federal Rural do Rio de Janeiro(UFRRJ), é presidente da União Nacional dos Estudiosos em Meteorologia e representante da América do Sul no comitê internacional que estuda educação sem distância de meteorologia. É também pesquisador associado do Instituto Virtual Internacional de Mudanças Globais, da COPPE/UFRJ.