From shs@stanford.edu Sun Jan 6 18:10:13 2002 Received: from leland.Stanford.EDU (leland.Stanford.EDU [171.64.14.7]) by shasta.Stanford.EDU (8.9.0/8.9.0) with ESMTP id SAA10757 for ; Sun, 6 Jan 2002 18:10:12 -0800 Received: from elaine17.Stanford.EDU (elaine17.Stanford.EDU [171.64.15.82]) by leland.Stanford.EDU (8.11.6/8.11.6) with ESMTP id g072ABS22866 for ; Sun, 6 Jan 2002 18:10:11 -0800 (PST) Received: (from shs@localhost) by elaine17.Stanford.EDU (8.11.6/8.11.6) id g072ABn23774; Sun, 6 Jan 2002 18:10:11 -0800 (PST) Date: Sun, 6 Jan 2002 18:10:11 -0800 (PST) From: Stephen H Schneider To: Dennis Allison Subject: Re: Abstract In-Reply-To: <200201061947.g06JlMH26083@epic25.Stanford.EDU> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Status: R How about cribbing sentences from the following longish abstract: THE GLOBAL WARMING DEBATE: SEPARATING THE SCIENTIFIC SIGNAL FROM THE POLITICAL NOISE Stephen H. Schneider., Dept. of Biological Sciences, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305-5020, shs@stanford.edu Inordinate contention attends complex socio-technical problems like global warming. The polarized extremes (end of the world versus good for us) are, I believe, the two lowest probability cases, yet they dominate media and political debates and editorial pages. No responsible scientist would claim to have precise expectations about our climatic future, its implications for nature and our lives or the costs of doing something about it. Nevertheless, a great deal of consensus exists about many aspects of the topic, despite the large uncertainties which accompany other components. In full recognition of the remaining uncertainties, a half-dozen pieces of circumstantial evidence were sufficient for the 100-scientist Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Chang (IPCC) to assert in 1995: "nevertheless, the balance of evidence suggests that there is a discernible human influence on global climate". The 2000AD IPCC assessment, while strengthening this conclusion based on five more years data and analysis, has brought to the forefront a new discernible statement: this time that recent observations of regional climate changes and the movements of wildlife, marine systems, ice extent and the timing of vegetation life cycles are becoming clear enough in the past few decades--very likely to be the warmest in at least 1000years---that there now appears to be a discernible impact of regional climatic variations on natural systems. The prime implications of this new finding is that as the climate continues to change--and in most mainstream scientific studies that is expected to accelerate substantially in the 21st century--we can expect natural systems to become highly stressed. I will try to distinguish which are the well known components of the debate, contrast them to the over-contentious media/political debate, and put this problem in the context of so-called Integrated Assessment of policy responses to the advent or prospect of global warming. International scientific assessments have for decades emphasized the necessity of treating uncertainties in their reports to governments contemplating policy options to deal with the advent or prospect of human-induced climatic changes. The most recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Third Assessment Report (TAR) is now completed, and unlike previous reports there is a formal guidance paper(prepared by Richard Moss and Stephen Schneider after three rounds of review) which recommends strategies to explicitly account for uncertainties. Although some might expect this to be welcome news to scientists, a number of authors--particularly physical scientists from developed countries--have somewhat resisted the notion of expressing quantitative subjective probabilities to characterize uncertainty. Nevertheless, without probabilities atttached (even highly subjective ones), any outcomes projected cannot be put into a risk-management framework, and the nature of this conundrum will be highlighted. On Sun, 6 Jan 2002, Dennis Allison wrote: > Steve -- > If you get a chance, could you send me a short abstract for Wednesday. I could make one, > but I hate to put words in peoples mouths. I have put up a placeholder on the web page, > but it's incomplete. See http://www.stanford.edu/class/ee380 > > -dra > ------ Stephen H. Schneider Dept. of Biological Sciences Stanford University Stanford, CA 94305-5020 U.S.A. Tel: (650)725-9978 Fax: (650)725-4387 shs@leland.stanford.edu