12-15-2002
From: Ashwani Vasishth vasishth@usc.edu
http://ens-news.com/ens/dec2002/2002-12-09-09.asp
Climate Change Could Come Fast and Furious
SAN FRANCISCO, California, December 9, 2002 (ENS) - The effects of global
climate change could be more abrupt and more catastrophic than many
scientists have predicted, warns a Penn State climatologist.
Debate in the U.S. over climate change often focuses on whether things
will be as bad as some scientists say they will be. Dr. Richard Alley of
Penn State says the more important question may be whether researchers are
confident that things will be as good as they are predicting.
"I am not an alarmist," said Dr. Alley, the Evan Pugh professor of
geosciences at Penn State. "Essentially, the Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change is very good and is doing a very good job."
The IPCC is under the auspices of the World Meteorological Organization
and operates through the United Nations Environmental Programme.
"What some policy makers are seeing as information on climate change looks
nicer than what is likely to happen," Alley said Saturday at the fall
meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco. He was the
Cesare Emiliani Lecturer at the conference.
Alley's concern is that what most policy makers hear is an executive
summary of an executive summary. This diluted, abstracted information
almost always shows a smooth curve of predicted climate changes.
Alley, who chaired the National Research Council's Panel on Abrupt Climate
Change, is concerned that changes will be quicker and larger than now
predicted. The curve will be rough on a daily, monthly or yearly basis,
rather than the smooth curve that appears for predicted aggregate data.
"If there is one thing we are almost positive of, it is that nature never
does anything smoothly," Alley said. "Scientists like to work from models
and our current models are really pretty good, but we find that models do
not make changes as big as nature did in the past. Models are not as
sensitive to change as nature is."
Given that the future could be quite challenging, it would be wise for
policy makers to start looking for ways that people can adapt when climate
changes, Alley said. He noted that there is ample historic evidence of
human groups who refused or were unable to adapt to climatic changes, and
their societies collapsed or failed, while other groups adapted to the new
environment and coped and sometimes thrived.
Congress, federal agencies and even local governments who must deal with
these changes when they happen should look at ways to plan for changes in
water supply, crop production, heating oil demand, flood control and other
things likely to be affected by climate change, Alley said. These groups
should establish contingencies to meet problems with scarcity of resources
before there is competition for these resources, he advised.
"Likely we will be surprised no matter how good our models are," Alley
concluded, "and the IPCC and other governmental groups need to plan for
this surprise and deal with resource conflicts in a progressive way."
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