| | Dear Prof. Alcamo. Many thanks for this very productive exchange and for sharing your knowledge with our world audience. I have a final question to you: it seems that the work leadig to AR5 will also pay a special attention to climate issues in Africa. Is this planned to be so?
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| | Mr. Leal,
It is important to point out to readers of this forum that the assessments of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, including its next one (AR5), only review the work done by other researchers. So the important point is to stimulate researchers in Africa and elsewhere to get involved in climate studies. I for one, think this is one of the most important tasks for the climate research community over the coming years.
Ironically, if I had my way, I would use a little Ju-Jitsu to turn around the threat of climate change into an opportunity for accelerating sustainable development on the African continent – Studies on adapting water supply to climate change should turn into studies of long term sustainable, low cost water management options – from water harvesting to participatory watershed management; studies on adapting agriculture to climate change should explore the long term introduction of integrated pest management, or better management of agricultural residues. Especially for Africa, we finally have to couple the idea of adapting to climate change with sustainable development.
In any event, best wishes to all of your readers and I hope that they will continue contributing to climate change science and policy, or begin to get involved. We need them!
Joseph Alcamo
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| | Dear/ Prof. Joseph Alcamo
I am very happy to write this note for you and will be happy if i meet you.
We found alarge amount of data from models so i make a comparisons between 5 models to choose the best.
I studied the future climate of the tropical Africa by comparison the output from five models from 1979 to 2000 to compare with (NCEP) reanalysis data of the ten stations which started from 1979. Outputs from five different AOGCMs are represented from the CSAG Data Dissemination Centre (DDC).
The five GCM models are: (GFDL) model, (GISS) model, Max Planck Institute for Meteorology, Germany (ECHAM5) model, (CSIRO-MK3_5) model and (CCCMA) model.
I choose ten stations in the tropical Africa as a case study for the comparison between observed and output results for five GCM models are:
Dakar- Tambacounda- Abidjan- Odienne- Ndjamena- Kinshasa- Jimma- Mandera- Zanzibar- Musoma.
From the previous comparisons i constructed that the CCCMA and ECHAM5 models have the least root mean square error (RMSE) and mean bias (MB) compare with the other models.
For this i used CCCMA and ECHAM5 models to show the future climate of the selected stations during the period 2046-2065, i found that the trends of maximum temperature are positive for Dakar and Musoma stations and stations (Tambacounda, Abidjan, Odienne, and Zanzibar) have negative trends. While for minimum temperature we found positive trends in Dakar, Ndjamina, Jimma, and Mandera, and the stations that have the negative trends are Tambacounda, Abidjan, Odienne, Kinshasa, Zanzibar and Musoma. Most of stations give a positive trend of precipitation except for two stations gave us a negative trend. The stations that have positive trend are Dakar, Tambacounda, Abidjan, Odienne, Ndjamina, Jimma, Mandera and Zanzibar. The stations that have the negative trends are Kinshasa, and Musoma.
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| | Mr. Gamal,
I think you have pointed out a good way of coping with the uncertainty of models, namely to examine the output of several models.
But I am not sure that at this point we can really identify a “best model” for a particular location, even though you are making a good try. The reason is that there are many different important performance measures, with maximum and minimum temperatures being only two of them. For example, for Africa I would also be interested in knowing how the models perform in simulating evaporation since this is needed in assessing climate impacts on crops, or in estimating the occurrence of drought since this is an important indicator of availability of water supplies.
Rather than try and identify the best climate model for climate impact studies for a particular part of the world, I would suggest that researchers use the output from several different climate models. The aim would be to identify robust conclusions that take into account the uncertainty of climate model output.
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| | Dear Dr. Alcamo,
Many thanks for giving me this opportunity to interact with you. My question relates to water - your area of expertise. We all are aware how vital a commodity water is! still we know so less about its current availability and demand, leave alone the reasonable future projections. Most of water related data is simply non-existent, what is available is quiet old (Best of water related data goes back to 2007).
Let me elaborate my question with with an example, FAO database shows that per capita water availability in India is approximately 1614 m3/capita/yr (2007), which puts India, way above the water stressed level of 1000 m3/cap/yr, while in reality we know almost all cities in India suffer from water stress in dry seasons, including the Cherrapunji (the wettest of them all!). The problem is that we dont know how much of water stays back within the bounds of the country and how much is drained. Data on Water holding capacity (Aquifers + dams + lakes etc) of a country is not available, which is so vital for planning and ground action. Again regional level data points are as well not available. When it comes to water demand, the situation is even worse, there are many estimates and there is a doubt that anyone is getting the picture right. This uncertainty greatly hampers effective action on water related issues. Could this problem be remedied. Could you suggest me better data sources in public domain which i may be missing.
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| | In my opinion, the modeling is the only way to reconstruct water databases. we also have to focus on tools which help us for modeling the databases of water resources . For example, in order to reconstruct the data in some regions like Asia we can detect the occurrences of flood and drought by paleoclimatic research. consequently it leads to improve our models.
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| | Mr. Kumar,
First of all, let me say that it sometimes does make sense to using aggregated averages for a whole large country when doing a first rough global comparison of the water situation in different countries. Although in this case I think the “withdrawals to availability” ratio gives a better overview of the situation in a country than the “water availability per capita” indicator that you cite.
That being said, you are absolutely right that such top down indicators cannot capture the real situation in particular cities or parts of a country. As sources for more disaggregated data, may I suggest the electronic water data atlas of the Global Water System Project (http://www.gwsp.org/), or the web site of the World Water Assessment Programme (http://www.unesco.org/water/wwap/). These are groups working on the global scale but who are also beginning to compile data with higher spatial resolution that might be useful to you.
Of course, in the end, I would not go to an international organization to obtain data for a particular city or watershed. I believe the only alternative is to convince local universities and local authorities (or perhaps national authorities) to collect the data urgently needed for devising strategies for coping with local water scarcity.
And if I could add, since the topic is climate change today, I believe climate change will unfortunately make it more difficult for many cities to deliver adequate water services – Warmer air temperatures will increase per capita drinking water requirements; increasing frequency of droughts in some parts of the world will reduce the reliability of water withdrawals for municipalities and industries; and sea level rise will push salt further upstream in estuaries where some cities now withdraw freshwater for their needs. These are not unsolvable problems, but municipalities have to take into account climate change in their planning. In a word, municipal planners need to “mainstream” climate change.
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| | Dear Dr. Alcamo,
As per rising voice of climate justice movement, now more and more people are aware that polluting here and offsetting there is not a just solution neither for the people nor for the planet. Moreover we have seen crashes like in EU ETS Phase 1 and free give-away of carbon allowances, that basically makes it only profitable for businesses to keep up with BAU if not making it worse. However the policy makers, especially from Annex-1 countries still push on to include more carbon trading schemes in a global agreement (ie. REDD etc.).
What is your take on carbon finance and it's promise to save the planet?
Do you think we can simply adjust our system and keep on polluting or do we need a new way of thinking about the way we live by producing and consuming less?
Best,
Ethemcan Turhan
Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona
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| | Dear Dr Alcamo,
What would you answer to people accusing actions taken on climate change of being part of a new form of neocolonialism.
Sophie Bonnard
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| | Dear Dr. Alcamo
Is there any reasonable explanation why China opposes an international climate agreement? I simply don't understand their position in the UN climate negotiations.
With kindest regards
Germar Dahms
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| | Do you think "clean coal" technology and using local coal resources can be a good strategy for tackling climate change problem? Ministry of Environment and Foresty of Turkey thinks that this will help. It was written in the draft strategy document which was distributed during COP15.
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| | Dear Dr Alcamo,
What is meant by sustainable agriculture with regard to climate change mitigation and adaptation?
What do you think of the fact that there seems to be a strong reluctance among the politic community to take measures in order to reduce agricultural CO2 emissions?
Looking forward to your reply,
Sophie Bonnard
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| | What is meant by sustainable agriculture with regard to climate change mitigation and adaptation?
First of all, it is important to point out that agriculture makes a big contribution to current global greenhouse gas emissions – Out of every 7 ½ tons of total emissions coming from society, about one ton comes from some sort of agricultural activity. Therefore sustainable agriculture is another important piece in the puzzle about how to slow down climate change.
That being said, it also is true that concept of “sustainable agriculture” is not a hard and fixed scientific concept, but it is more a package of ideas about how agricultural practices could be modified to lower their emissions and better adapt to expected climate change.
And there are a lot of good ideas that fit into this package. For example, agriculture makes a large contribution to an important greenhouse gas, nitrous oxide, because one of the main sources of this gas is the use of nitrogen-based fertilizers. It turns out that a portion of the nitrogen not used by plants is converted by soil bacteria and released to the atmosphere in the form of nitrous oxide. So it follows that any measure that reduces the amount of fertilizer used on a hectare of farmland (for example, by better planning when it is applied) has the potential to reduce nitrous oxide emissions.
There is a similarly large set of ideas about how sustainable agriculture can help farmers better adapt to climate change. The measures themselves depend on what the farmer should adapt to – whether it is more frequent droughts, heat waves or flooding.
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| | Dear participant –
We are very happy to present to you a live online discussion with UNEP’s Chief Scientist Dr Joseph Alcamo who will join us on June 4 from 10-12 (UK time, UTC) on this website!
Post your questions here - we look forward to an exciting discussion.
Best regards -
your World Climate Teach-In Day Team
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| | Dear Dr Alcamo
Please find below my question:
There is widespread agreement that global warming takes place. Recently an international study confirmed that the top layer of the world's ocean has warmed steadily since 1993, adding to the case that global warming is taking place. Concerning future climate scenarios, how precise can models and scenarios in global integrated assessments actually predict future climate change? What input data do they rely on?
Grateful for your reply.
Franziska Mannke
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| | Indeed, it is no surprise that the top layer of the ocean has been steadily warming because the ocean has been taking up “over 80% of the excess heat being added to the climate system” according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
As to predicting climate change, we can’t expect the models used to assess climate change to be perfect. A “model” is just that – a model of reality, not reality itself. A model is an approximation, or characterization of the real world, and so it’s clear that models give results that are to some degree uncertain.
Scientists do their best to reduce uncertainty and gain confidence in the performance of a climate models by testing them against current or historical climate data, for example temperature and precipitation measurements. If a model can calculate current climate patterns we have some confidence that they can help us estimate future climate patterns under increased levels of greenhouse gases.
One way to cope with the unavoidable uncertainty of models and their calculations is to use them for computing “scenarios” rather for making predictions. “Scenarios” are conditional “if-then” calculations. For a given set of model inputs, and a given set of other model assumptions, the model predicts a particular future set of climate conditions. Typically a certain future level of greenhouse gas emissions and other atmospheric substances are assumed for a model experiment and then the model computes the resulting future climate – future levels of precipitation and temperature, most importantly. These future levels are scenarios rather than predictions. They are future states that are possible (not inevitable) according to a given set of assumptions. This is a lot different than making predictions. Using models in this way takes away from the unreasonable expectation that models can predict the exact state of future climate. Someone once said that it’s really hard to make predictions, especially about the future!
Yes, models are certainly uncertain, but despite their uncertainty, they’re still one of our best chances for anticipating the implications of future climate change
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| | Dear Dr. Alcamo,
There is the general belief that climate change will have many worldwide impacts. In what way will climate change affect the world’s ecosystems?
Thank you for your reply!
Natalie
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| | Since living things depend on, and have adapted to, the climate around them, it is logical that any substantial change in climate will pose a substantial challenge or even a threat to them.
Summarizing the state of knowledge up to 2007, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says that around 20 to 30% of all animal and plant species are likely to be at greater risk of becoming extinct if global average air temperature increases exceeds 1.5 to 2.5 degrees Celsius, relative to the pre-industrial period. It’s worth noting that average air temperature has already increased by more than 0.7 degrees since the early part of the last century.
But these are future anticipated impacts in the absence of strong climate policy. It is interesting to note that biological systems are already showing early signs of the change – over the past few years “spring events” such as leaf-unfolding, egg-laying, and bird migration have occurred earlier and earlier in the high latitudes. And as mentioned in answering the previous question, water temperatures in marine systems have been steadily rising and the same has been found for lakes and rivers.
Because of warmer temperatures ice cover has also been steadily diminishing. These changes have in turn propelled changes in the salinity, oxygen levels and circulation of marine and freshwater systems. And these changes have had the knock-on effect of changing the abundance of organisms at the bottom of the food web – the simple plants and animals called phytoplankton and zooplankton – as well as fish and other organisms at the top. So climate change impacts on ecosystems are already being documented.
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| | Dear Dr. Alcamo:
Although the extinction of species makes our biodiversity poorer, what are the real dangers of that? In our ecosystems living things depend on each other, but could we not adapt to much biodiversity loss, and does it not depend on which species will be extinct, as some species are more important than others? And cannot functions performed certain species be perfomed by others if they are extinct?
Thank you,
Monica Stein
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| | Dear Ms. Stein,
I don’t feel that I am qualified to wade into the interesting debate going on about the connection between biodiversity and ecosystem functioning.
That being said, my ecologist colleagues are trying to convince me that species richness or composition have an important effect, at least in some ecosystems, on how matter and energy are cycled through a particular ecosystem, and therefore affect the functioning or existence of the ecosystem. As I understand it, this hypothesis remains to be fully tested, and so we will see where we stand in a few years.
In the meantime, many people, myself included, believe that we humans have an ethical imperative not to endanger the existence of other living species, and that loss of biodiversity is something to be regretted.
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| | Dear Dr Alcamo
Is it important to communicate cutting-edge findings about climate change to students from schools and universities and to make them aware of predicted changes and impacts?
Working at a university I am puzzled that, due to various reasons, the topic of climate change does not really find its way into the curricula even though it touches nearly every discipline (unless the field clearly deals with cc issues, e.g. environmental management). Maybe spreading the awareness of cc by means of the power of Web 2.0 technology is a faster, maybe even more attractive way of getting the word out.
Looking very forward to your reply.
Franziska
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| | Dear Dr. Alcamo, particularly for more senior school students and university students, how can one best respond to those who are sceptics, without just "gagging" them into silence? One argument often used is that predictions are not precise, so the current science may or may not be correct. But there are also other arguments and other types of sceptics - is there a good way to persuade them?
Thank you very much for your reply, Brigitte Hines
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| | I think the obvious answer to this question is “yes”. Changes in climate are bound to have pervasive impacts on all aspects of society and nature, and in turn on the future of students studying today.
Students of natural science need to understand climate change because it will affect all earth processes – Climate change will affect the long term geological forces that alter the earth’s surface as in the force of winds and running water. Likewise it will have an important impact on short term ecological processes that leave their mark on our ecosystems, including the growth rate of trees and the spreading of pollen.
Students of engineering need to know how sea level rise and possible river flooding instigated by climate change are going to affect the roads, bridges, and tunnels they plan to build; while business students have to understand how changes in the frequency of storms, droughts and other extreme climate events will affect their future investments, and how the costs of a low-carbon future will affect the economic futures of their countries.
Once medical students begin to practice their profession they will have to learn how to cope with a change in hazards to health – there will be less danger of people freezing in the winter, but perhaps a greater risk from more frequent heat waves and higher levels of ground-level ozone related to climate change.
For me it is clear that the topic of climate change, or more generally, global change, needs to be integrated somewhere in the curricula of nearly all university subjects. We need to be creative and flexible about how to do this. At my university we have specific courses about climate change in our engineering faculty, whereas in other universities it is incorporated as a sub-topic in courses about environmental law or geography.
And I also think you are right, Franziska, about the potential of using the power of new web technology as a teaching tool – One idea would be to use this technology to set up more interactive knowledge centers where data and information about climate change and its impacts can be shared.
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| | Dear Dr. Alcamo, particularly for more senior school students and university students, how can one best respond to those who are sceptics, without just "gagging" them into silence? One argument often used is that predictions are not precise, so the current science may or may not be correct. But there are also other arguments and other types of sceptics - is there a good way to persuade them?
Thank you very much for your reply, Brigitte Hines
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| | Dr. Mohinder Slariya, environmental sociologist from Chamba district of Himachal Pradesh, India, would like to know:
Why don’t policy makers around the globe think to forcefully/emphatically implement the environmental regulations passed from time to time to protect the environment, polluted by the exactors?
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| | T. Akbari, PHD student in field of Climatology, University of Tehran, asks the following:
Dear Sir,
1. Do you recommend graduate students who are interested in doing research in field of climate change to work on paleoclimatic projects?
2. What is the relationship between climate change and paleoclimatology research today? Is there a close relationship?
3. In your opinion, what is the main priority for someone who is going to do research in field of climate change in western part of Asia?
With best regards,
T. Akbari
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| | Nam Raj khatri, Environmental Engineer from Nepal sent in the following question:
Dear Dr Alcamo,
I will be happy to see you online tomorrow.
My question is:
Here in nepal Major donor for water supply system is ADB and World Bank. Their are also supporting for climate Change related activity from many channels. Unfortunately they do not concern anything while developing project. They only understand procurement and initial cost. My calculation says system (supply and treatment) involving or not invlving energy makes many diference in terms of carbon emission. Do you agree with my point and what do you have to say for these development partners?
Best regards
Nam Raj khatri
Environmental Engineer
Nepal
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| | Muhammad Rizwan Ul Haq asks the following:
How do impacts of Climate change effects the reproductive health in a marganalized group of community?
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| | Arif Cem Gundogan asks the following:
Dear Dr Alcamo,
What do you think about the prophecy of the World Bank as the world’s climate banker?
Arif Cem Gundogan
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