1. Climate Change: The Move to Action (AOSS 480 // NRE 480)
Richard B. Rood
Cell:
2525 Space Research Building (North Campus)
Winter 2014
March 13, 2014

2. Something I am playing with
Class News
Ctools site: AOSS_SNRE_480_001_W14
Something I am playing with
Assignment ed
Posted
Politics of Dismissal Entry
Uncertainty Description
Model

3. Problem Solving / Class Discussion
Do we need to address climate change? Global warming?
Are either of these good words for communication?
How do we address climate change?
What do we have to do?
Is our knowledge too uncertain?
What motivates you personally?
What might motivate governments?

4. Summary Points: Science
Correlated Observations
CO2 and Temperature Observed to be strongly related on long time scales (> 100 years)
CO2 and Temperature not Observed to be strongly related on short time scales (< 10 years)
Land Use / Land Change
Other Greenhouse Gases
Aerosols
Internal Variability
Theory / Empirical Evidence
CO2 and Water Vapor Hold Heat Near Surface
Validation
Consequences
Theory / Conservation Principle
Mass and Energy Budgets
 Concept of “Forcing”
Prediction Earth Will Warm
Attribution
Feedbacks
Air Quality
“Abrupt” Climate Change
Observations
CO2 is Increasing due to Burning Fossil Fuels

5. Dangerous climate change?
Stern, 2006

6. Science, Mitigation, Adaptation Framework
Adaptation is responding to changes that might occur from added CO2
It’s not an either / or argument.
Mitigation is controlling the amount of CO2 we put in the atmosphere.

7. Responses to the Climate Change Problem
Autonomous/
Individual
Policy/
Societal
This is Parson’s 2x2 matrix that summarizes responses. The left side is Adaptation heavy, the right side is Mitigation heavy. (Possibly link the Carnegie Mellon Capability Maturity Model, linking planning and anticipation to life cycle cost and schedule.)
Reactive
Anticipatory
Adaptation
Mitigation

8. Summary Points: U.S. Energy

9. McKinsey 2007: Large

10. Thinking about the lay of the land …
Couple of classic pictures

11. Oil Consumption - Production
How has then changed since 2003? How does this influence the arguments for addressing climate change?
PRODUCTION
Energy Information Administration

12. ENERGY VERSUS HUNGER RICH VERSUS POOR
How has then changed since 2002? How does this influence the arguments for addressing climate change?
Amigos de la Tierra Int. y Acción Ecológica 2002.
Thanks to Maria Carmen Lemos

13. Changes in Energy and Food? Economies?
Does this change the need to address climate change?
Does this change our ability to address climate change?
U.S. as a consumer or producer nation? Is China still so hungry? China energy use is up tremendously.

14. Problem Solving

15. Granularity
No matter how we cut through this problem we come to the conclusion that there is a lot of granularity within the problem. This granularity represents complexity, which must be used to develop a portfolio of solutions rather than to classify the problem as intractable.
Need to come up with something better here.

16. The previous viewgraphs have introduced “granularity”
This is a classic short-term versus long-term problem.
Ethics
Economics
Reaction versus anticipation
Similarly, regional versus global
Rich and poor
Competing approaches
Mitigation versus adaptation
Transportation versus Electrical Generation
This versus that

17. We arrive at levels of granularity
Need to introduce spatial scales as well
WEALTH
Sandvik: Wealth and Climate Change
SPATIAL
LOCAL
GLOBAL
TEMPORAL
NEAR-TERM
LONG-TERM
Small scales inform large scales.
Large scales inform small scales.

18. What is short-term and long-term?
Pose that time scales for addressing climate change as a society are best defined by human dimensions. Length of infrastructure investment, accumulation of wealth over a lifetime, ...
LONG
SHORT
ENERGY SECURITY
Election time scales
CLIMATE CHANGE
ECONOMY
There are short-term issues important to climate change.
0 years
25 years
50 years
75 years
100 years

19. Structure of Problem Solving (http://glisaclimate.org/home )

20. Skill Set Analysis Evaluation / Judgment Synthesis
Distinguish between facts and inferences
Evaluation / Judgment
What is the quality of the knowledge?
Synthesis
How do pieces fit together?

21. Deconstructing how to think about projects.
1) Describe what is in the picture. What are the facts? Make an inventory of what is known. Make an inventory of what is not known.
4) What to do?
Consequences?
Options?
2) Analysis: How credible is the information? What is the integrity of the reporting? How complete is the picture? Is there derived knowledge? …
A primary reference for this data is Petit et al. (Nature, 1999). There is a remarkable amount of information in this figure. A good exercise would be to describe the variability in the plot, then to analyze what the plot may or may not be telling you about co2 and temperature as well as global warming. It is also interesting to think about human enterprise and this plot. I would call this one of three canonical figures that needs to be understood for participation in the climate change debate.
3) Does it matter? Impact. Consequences.
Relations
Why?

22. Projects

23. Use of climate information
Research on the use of climate knowledge states that for successful projects, for example:
Co-development / Co-generation
Trust
Narratives
Scale
Spatial
Temporal
Lemos and Morehouse, 2005

24. Project Details
You want to make a knowledge-based evaluation of the problem and present an approach or a set of possible approaches to address the problem. (Want you to be very aware of “advocacy” in your thinking.)
Project Description

25. Projects: Goals and Context
In school students often learn to work independently, in their field, but in jobs people are often thrown into teams
You are suddenly the “expert.”
Goals
How to define a tractable problem // reduce it to something you can do
Drawing a picture
How to separate the essence of a problem from the details
What do we know, what do we believe, what are we attached to?
What do the other participants really need – not what you think they need.
Check, How to Check
Communication
Complexity, sophistication, audience, context, naivety, dumbing down
How to explain what you are doing.
Balance, optimization

26. Projects
Bigger goals ...
How do we move this problem beyond polarized positions on details.
Move it from climate-policy, climate-business, climate-public health, climate-agriculture, climate-ecosystems, climate-...(interest advocacy groups)
to climate-business-policy-public health - ecosystems
How do we bring several communities together for the development of foundational solution paths or, at least, strategies that make sense.
Systems, systems, systems

27. An interesting book for thinking about projects: (Example of process, deconstruction, …)
Climate Change: Debating America’s Policy Options
David Victor (2004)
Council on Foreign Relations, New York, NY
166 pages.

28. Iconic and Fundamental Figures

29. Scientific investigation of Earth’s climate
SUN: ENERGY, HEAT
EARTH: ABSORBS ENERGY
EARTH: EMITS ENERGY TO SPACE  BALANCE

30. Sun-Earth System in Balance
PLACE AN INSULATING BLANKET AROUND EARTH
The addition to the blanket is CO2
FOCUS ON WHAT IS HAPPENING AT THE SURFACE
EARTH: EMITS ENERGY TO SPACE  BALANCE

31. Increase of Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide (CO2)
Primary increase comes from burning fossil fuels – coal, oil, natural gas
Data and more information

32. Temperature and CO2: The last 1000 years
Surface temperature and CO2 data from the past 1000 years. Temperature is a northern hemisphere average. Temperature from several types of measurements are consistent in temporal behavior.
Temperature starts to follow CO2 as CO2 increases beyond approximately 300 ppm, the value seen in the previous graph as the upper range of variability in the past 350,000 years.
Medieval warm period
“Little ice age”

33. The Earth System SUN ATMOSPHERE ICE OCEAN (cryosphere) LAND
CLOUD-WORLD
ATMOSPHERE
OCEAN
ICE
(cryosphere)
LAND

34. Radiation Balance Figure

35. Radiative Balance (Trenberth et al. 2009)

36. 1998 Climate Forcing 2001 Hansen et al: (1998) & (2001) (-2.7, -0.6)
(-3.7, 0.0)
Hansen et al: (1998) & (2001)