Office of Science and Technology Policy, Executive Office of the President
USGCRP has launched a new, more interactive website that showcases the 2009 National Climate Assessment (NCA) report, Global Change Impacts in the United States. The website can be found at: http://nca2009.globalchange.gov/
As a first step toward future efforts to enhance traceability of NCA data and sources, the site incorporates access to a sample of the datasets used as a basis for the 2009 report. The site provides an enhanced web-based interface for the NCA’s wide range of stakeholders—from private citizens, to business leaders, to local decision makers, and more—to search for findings, topics, and sources for the 2009 report that are most relevant to their needs.
The launch comes as USGCRP is in the thick of preparing its next NCA report, due for release in 2013. Work is already underway to ensure that insights gained from enhancing access to the 2009 report are incorporated into efforts for 2013.
“We developed the site as a way of trying out some methods to improve transparency and searchability,†said Dr. Anne Waple, Program Manager for NOAA’s Assessment Services and Chair of the NCA Technical Support Unit. “We learned a lot of lessons in the process that will inform our efforts for the 2013 report and the sustained assessment effort.â€
A quick rollover of the interactive map on the front page of the site gives a summary of regional climate impacts, even before the first click. Users interested in delving deeper can explore climate information by region or sector, click through to some sample datasets, view relevant images and information about their sources, and even read supporting documents for the assessment.
“For us, this is a small but important step forward,†said Emily Cloyd, Public Participation and Engagement Coordinator for the National Climate Assessment. “Analyzing what works and what doesn’t will be critical to our future efforts.â€
ACCFP fellows convened Tuesday at USGCRP headquarters in Washington, DC to engage in a dialogue with representatives from several Federal agencies and other organizations.
On Tuesday, Climate Change Fellows from more than 10 African nations convened at USGCRP’s National Coordination Office in Washington, DC to discuss their experiences applying scientific knowledge to climate change adaptation efforts in Africa. The fellows represented the inaugural class of the African Climate Change Fellowship Program (ACCFP). The ACCFP is a partnership between the global change SysTem for Analysis, Research and Training (START), the Institute of Resource Assessment at the University of Dar Es Salaam (Tanzania) and the Climate Change Adaptation in Africa (CCAA) program.
The International START Secretariat, located in Washington, DC, is hosted and co-funded by the United States to advance knowledge and build capacity to address global environmental change in developing regions of the world. In 2008, START and its partners launched the ACCFP fellowship program to build capacity for climate change adaptation in Africa by providing seed funding to African scientists for research projects and teaching opportunities across the continent. ACCFP’s inaugural class of 45 fellows represented 18 African Nations and focused on the common theme of knowledge for decision making.
Tuesday’s meeting provided a forum for ACCFP alumni to engage in open dialogue with Federal representatives from USGCRP, USAID, NSF, NASA, USDA, the Department of State, the Department of Energy and others seeking to enable climate adaptation capacity building, both in Africa and around the world.
ACCFP alumna Mzime Ndebele-Murisa described her doctoral research at the University of the Western Cape.
The ACCFP program is unique in its emphasis on matching fellows with host institutions from other African nations. Fellows travel to and collaborate with host institutions to implement projects across a range of topics—from advancing understanding of climate risks and vulnerabilities, to identifying adaptation strategies, to integrating adaptation strategies with local policy, and more. The fellow-to-host matching process creates networks of climate adaptation experts and practitioners across the African continent that can be harnessed for knowledge sharing and partnerships that might not otherwise be possible.
In addition to presenting research accomplishments achieved during their fellowships, ACCFP Alumni used Tuesday’s meeting as an opportunity to share first-hand insights about needs, challenges, and opportunities to enhance the use of climate change adaption research in ways that are useful to long-term strategy development, policymaking, and day-to-day decisions.
Fellows discussed the wide array of demonstrated applications of their work—from informing fisheries management planning in Zimbabwe, to bringing meteorological forecasting information to secondary schools in Tanzania, to providing climate change training to NGO’s in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and much more.
There was unanimous agreement among the fellows in the room that the connections established through the ACCFP alumni network have proven extremely valuable, even after graduation from the Program. For example, three ACCFP fellows from Nigeria teamed up after completion of their individual projects to work on water resource mapping to inform climate adaption plans in Nigerian communities.
There was also unanimous agreement on needs for future capacity building. When a fellow from Ghana raised the need to more effectively communicate climate change information to farmers, fisherman, communities, and others who use and depend on it, there were many affirming nods around the room. The fellows agreed that translation of scientific knowledge into information that it accessible, useable, and relevant is absolutely critical to the proliferation of effective climate adaptation strategies in Africa.
A total of 24 adaptation policy and science fellows make up the ACCFP’s most recent class of participants (2011); these individuals are currently in residence at their host institutions and work is underway. Application screening is also underway for the third ACCFO cohort, to be comprised of 16 additional science and policy fellows and 10 teaching fellows to complete projects in 2012.
Philip Duffy, Senior Policy Analyst
Becky Fried, Policy Analyst,
Office of Science and Technology Policy, Executive Office of the President
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton last week announced the Climate and Clean Air Coalition, a voluntary partnership that includes the United States, Bangladesh, Canada, Ghana, Mexico, Sweden, and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) to reduce short-lived atmospheric pollutants such as methane, hydrofluorocarbons, and black carbon, or soot. These fast-acting climate pollutants are estimated to be responsible for about a third of global warming over the past 50 years, and are proven to have significant impacts on public health and world food production.
On Thursday, Clinton and other leaders emphasized that it remains important to reduce carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions to address long-term climate-change challenges. But the reduction of short-lived climate pollutants (SLCPs) can bring important near-term benefits for climate, human health, welfare, and the environment, she said.
The six-nation coalition hopes to grow to include other nations committed to reducing emissions of SLCPs. This approach differs from the international process for controlling CO2 emissions, which focuses on reaching consensus agreements among a much larger group of nations.
Emissions of methane, which is more than 20 times as potent a greenhouse gas as CO2 by weight in the short term, can be reduced by measures such as fixing leaky gas pipes and aerating rice paddy fields. Soot—which warms the atmosphere and accelerates ice melting in the Arctic and elsewhere, and combines with other pollutants to cause heart disease, lung disease, and cancer that contributes to 2 million premature deaths per year—can be minimized with diesel-particle filters in vehicles, cleaner cookstove models, and other measures. Ozone created by SLCPs also contributes to lung damage and reduces crop yields.
A recent scientific report by UNEP showed that a concerted effort to reduce SLCPs could significantly delay global warming while helping to avoid the loss of millions of tons of crops and preventing millions of premature deaths per year by 2030.
This new Coalition will provide funding to developing countries to implement solutions and help raise supplementary funds from the public and private sectors for additional mitigation projects. To start, the Coalition is being funded with $15 million over two years—with $12 million coming from the United States and $3 million from Canada. It will complement related programs and partnerships such as the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves, in which several U.S. Government agencies, private companies, and national governments are collaborative partners.
Becky Fried, Policy Analyst,
Office of Science and Technology Policy, Executive Office of the President
Last week, the Interior Department’s US Geological Survey (USGS) released details about a landmark airborne survey of permafrost in the Yukon Flats of Alaska that yielded some of the most detailed, data-rich maps of permafrost ever generated. Permafrost—frozen ground that remains at or below water’s freezing point for at least two years—accounts for only 0.022% of all water on Earth, but it covers more than 20% of exposed land of Earth’s northern high latitudes (in addition to areas of Antarctica and the Patagonia region), where it plays a potentially important role in climate dynamics.
There are many reasons scientists seek to understand where permafrost is and how it is changing. One reason is that changes in permafrost can impact ground stability, affecting infrastructure such as roads, home foundations, water treatment facilities, and industrial sites. Another is that it changes in response to changes in temperature and water systems, and so is a key indicator of climate change.
But the permafrost-climate connection is a two-way street, in which changes in permafrost can also spur changes in climate. In part that’s because massive stores of carbon are locked up in permafrost. As temperatures rise, permafrost thaws, making these stores of carbon increasingly available for release into the atmosphere—which contributes to warming.
Permafrost surveys are typically conducted on the ground through surface monitoring and borehole measurements—a painstaking process. But the survey published last week was conducted by helicopter by towing an instrument that sends electromagnetic pulses downward and measures how the earth below responds to the pulses.
This information was used to create three-dimensional images of permafrost over larger areas than can be captured by ground-based methods, down to depths of more than 300 feet below the surface. The Yukon Flats of Alaska fall at a critical boundary between areas of continuous permafrost (to the north) and discontinuous permafrost (to the south)—making the region especially important to understanding how permafrost behaves under different conditions.
The study released last week demonstrated that this new airborne technique can complement USGS’s ongoing ground-based efforts and provide critical new information to hydrologists, ecologists, climate scientists, and land managers in the Yukon Flats and elsewhere.
Philip B Duffy, Senior Policy Analyst,
Office of Science and Technology Policy, Executive Office of the President
This week, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) released temperature data showing that 2011 was one of the warmest years since record-keeping began in 1880. Â The global temperature continued to be extremely warm even though at least two factors acted to push it downwards in the short term.
Despite a slight drop of about 0.2°F from 2010—which had tied with 2005 for the warmest year ever recorded—the data show that Earth continues to experience warmer temperatures than a few decades ago. NOAA’s analysis ranked 2011 as the 11th warmest year, while NASA’s showed 2011 to be the 9th warmest (rankings are expected to differ slightly because temperature differences between the warmest years are extremely small). Both rankings are consistent with a clear trend of increasing global temperatures—with the 12 hottest years on record all occurring since 1997, and the decade that started in 2000 the hottest in recorded history.
Still, the data also show that temperatures have not changed much since 2005, the year that tied 2010 as the warmest ever recorded. If temperatures have not risen recently, does that mean climate change has stopped? Â Actually, no. Â Just as stock prices do not go up every day in a bull market, global temperatures do not rise every year in an era of warming. Â In both cases, to understand if an upward trend will continue, one must look at the underlying forces that drive it.
In the case of climate change, the most important underlying force is increasing amounts of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.  This results primarily from human burning of fossil fuels (coal, oil, and natural gas).  Fossil fuel use not only continues, but is growing.  And because carbon dioxide, the most important greenhouse gas, remains in the atmosphere for many decades, the amount in the atmosphere increases even in those unusual years when emissions are flat or decrease slightly.  For example when global carbon dioxide emissions dipped by about 1% as a result of the recent global recession, the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere—which is the force that drives temperature—continued to increase.  And in most years emissions increase, so the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere increases at an even greater rate.
So why don’t temperatures go up every year? Because although increasing greenhouse gases are the most important force driving the global temperature, they are not the only force.  Weather variations, for example, push the global temperature up or down slightly every year.  Powerful volcanic eruptions can cause noticeable cooling for a couple of years.  And the energy output of the sun varies slightly (although since satellite measurements started in 1980 there has been no steady up or down trend in the sun).  These and other forces cause global temperatures to vary slightly from year to year.  To get a reliable indication of trends, one needs to consider at least a decade or two.
It’s noteworthy that 2011 was very warm despite two temporary cooling influences. The figure below shows that global temperatures were high in 2011 even though a weather variation known as La Niña caused colder than average temperatures over much of the Pacific Ocean.  (La Niña is a temporary cooling of temperatures in the Eastern tropical Pacific region, which has widespread impacts, including a slight global cooling.)  And between about 2005 and 2010 the sun’s energy output was lower than ever recorded, which also pushed temperatures down a little.  Both these forces are likely to reverse—in fact the sun’s energy output already has—which can be expected to drive future temperatures upwards in coming years.
Although the temperatures discussed above, which are measured just above the ground or ocean, are the most common way to gauge the global temperature, other data can be useful as well.  In particular, the “ocean heat content,†which involves ocean temperatures from the surface down to about 6,000 feet, is less susceptible to year-to-year variations.  This shows a steady march upwards, with each of the last 10 years setting a new record.
The continued high temperatures—despite downward pressure from La Niña and the sun, together with ongoing increases in atmospheric greenhouse gases and ocean heat content—show that global warming continues.
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Figure: Map showing 2011 temperatures as differences from the long-term average of 1971 through 2000.  Red indicates warmer than average temperatures, blue colder than average.  Colder than average temperatures in the Pacific Ocean region show the influence of La Niña, a common weather variation.  Despite this strong temporary cooling influence, global temperatures remained very high in 2011.
ACCFP fellows convened Tuesday at USGCRP headquarters in Washington, DC to engage in a dialogue with representatives from several Federal agencies and other organizations.
ACCFP alumna Mzime Ndebele-Murisa described her doctoral research at the University of the Western Cape.