On another unusually sunny and warm March day in London, the Excel Centre (above) played host to the second day of the Planet Under Pressure conference. The day began with an address by Yvo De Boer (former executive of the UNFCCC) who described that the key challenge for enabling green growth was decoupling human progress… Read more »
CSAG Blog
Planet Under Pressure: Day 1
In June this year, world leaders and the glitterati of global change sciences will meet in Brazil for the Rio+20 meeting. Twenty years on from the original Earth Summit, the world still faces daunting environmental challenges. In preparation for the Rio+20 meeting, scientists, policy makers, business leaders and the media are in London to discuss… Read more »
Ethiopia’s head start on delivering climate services in Africa
The World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) Global Framework for Climate Services (GFCS) was established at the World Climate Conference-3 (WCC-3) in Geneva, September 2009, with the joint aim of “better serving society’s need for accurate and timely information on climate” and increasing the number acronyms used in climate change discourse. The High-level Taskforce (HLT) was subsequently… Read more »
Regional climate predictions, projections or possibilities?
In a recent edition of EOS (newspaper of the American Geophysical Union), a provocatively titled piece by Roger Pielke Sr. and Robert Wilby, “Regional climate downscaling: what is the point?”, questions the information contained in regional climate model projections for use by the impacts community. Following a description of the various types of downscaling approaches,… Read more »
Another negative impact we could all do without
As an Englishman I do enjoy a good cup of tea. In the UK I was an occasional drinker of rooibos but now that I live in South Africa it is becoming a daily ritual. In fact, I am gradually migrating away from “normal” tea (at least that’s what we English call it) towards rooibos… Read more »
Climate change is an initial condition problem too!
In my experience, when scientists talk about climate change, many distinguish between weather and climate as noise about a trend; the noise being the weather and the climate being the trend, the signal hidden in the noise. I have a fundamental dislike for this treatment of weather as “noise” (see also blog by Roger Pielke… Read more »
Getting the right people in the room
I start with an open question. Is the UNFCCC the appropriate forum to address climate change adaptation? Following a very interesting dissection of the COP 17 outcomes at an ACDI event held earlier this week at UCT, one of the apparent successes of the Durban meeting was the progress made on adaptation. The UNFCCC is… Read more »
What is in store for 2012?
You cannot claim to be interested in global warming unless you are fascinated by a rather obscure climate variable. No, not the climate sensitivity (that comes in at a close second place) but the Global Mean Temperature (GMT). This variable has come to define the science of climate change and although no one can actually… Read more »
Results of the CSAG COP 17 Decision Game
The Context CSAG participated in a number of side events at the recent COP 17 meeting in Durban. A climate change decision game featured in three of these side events. Although each event had a different focus, the outline of the game remained consistent for each audience. The game relied on the active participation of… Read more »