# Presentation: 180489

## Climate Change Science Plan

- Some  Personal Reflections
- Charles F. Kennel

## National Research Council 

- Global Environmental Change: Research Pathways for the Next Decade (1999)
- The Science of Regional and Global Change: Putting Knowledge to Work (2001)
- Climate Change Science: An Analysis of Key Questions (2001)

## A New Organizational Focus

- Since “the current situation in the federal government does not sufficiently promote delivery of resources to key research, observational, and technological endeavors that either cross or transcend formal agency responsibilities”,...
- The NRC’s Committee on Global Change Research recommends *“the establishment of an institutional arrangement positioned with **sufficient authority** to **coordinate** global **and** regional environmental **research and decision-making**....”*

## The Most Critical Accomplishment

- Explicit commitment to building decision support capacity
- Initial focus on resolving key climate change uncertainties in 2-4 years
- Strengthening observations, modeling, and data management
- Reasonable choice of issues, scepticism that all can be achieved in 2-4 years

## A significant increase in breadth

- The new plan and structure enables a much stronger connection between “classical” global change research and ecosystem studies
- The new questions for basic biological and ecological sciences emerging from issues of global change have yet to be defined

## The most profound innovation

- A new branch of technology has been created: Climate Change Technology”
- Climate change technology research now has an organizational focus at the same level as science
- Climate Change Science Plan does not yet anticipate the “technology pull” to come
- Each major technology research thrust will make a demand on the sciences, and especially climate science
- Scientific forecasts set the time-scale for deployment of technologies
- Development and especially scale-up of any transformational technology will require ongoing scientific assessment of its global impact.

## The USGCRP Science Plan is not as well-articulated as the CCRI 

- The best defense against surprise is strong research
- Greatest uncertainty lies in what we are unaware of not knowing
- The lack of a few unifying initiatives undervalues the role of science
- The notion that USGCRP science can lead to meaningful policy only in 5-15 years does not imply that we need not undertake meaningful initiatives in the next 2-4 years
- The present paucity of clear 2-4 year science priorities undermines the balance in the research-observation-information-decision support continuum

## Some possible science initiatives

- Pilot rigorous regional climate science?
- Global and regional ecosystem dynamics?
- Millenium Ecosystem Assessment
- Census of Marine Life
- Global Biodiversity Assessment
- An International Ocean Change Decade?
- Abrupt climate change
- Southern ocean and arctic ice

## Do we need to encourage new (sub) disciplines?

- One example: it will soon be possible to investigate biogeochemical processes in the earth’s crust, in oceanic sediments, in the sunlit upper ocean, in soils,on aerosols, and elsewhere, at the levels of microbial ecology, evolution, and genomics
- The microbes were the original planetary engineers (until humans came along)

## National Academy of SciencesCommittee on Global Change Research“The Science of Global and Regional Change:  Putting Knowledge to Work”

- 2000’s limitations need not be 2006’s
- Our current “observing system” is a composite that _does not provide the information needed nor the continuity_ in the data to support decisions on critical issues.  Enthusiasm in plan for next implementing steps
- The U.S. _does not have the computational and modeling services_ needed to serve society’s information needs for reliable environmental predictions and projections. Acknowledged, but next steps not yet defined
- The _*partnerships*__ between_ both the physical and social science research communities and public and private decision-makers _required to address multiple interacting and changing environmental factors in specific geographic areas_ _*do not exist*_. Commitment to decision support, but regional issues not emphasized
*There is no mechanism in place to ensure that the nation’s highest priorities are addressed.   **Yes there is!*

- National Academy of SciencesCommittee on Global Change Research“The Science of Global and Regional Change:  Putting Knowledge to Work”

## This conference marks a turning point

- We all appreciate the open spirit
- We all want to help, and we will continue to
- Congratulations to the hard-working CCSP team, and especially Jim Mahoney, the conductor who made this orchestra (and soloists) sing
- Your work is not yet done, and ours is about to begin