Third National Climate Assessment Opened for Review

[don]

by MANUEL GARCIA, JR.

A Federal Advisory Committee called the “National Climate Assessment and Development Advisory Committee” or NCADAC, was established under the Department of Commerce in December 2010 and is supported through the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). NCADAC now oversees the activities of formulating the National Climate Assessment (NCA), and is funded through a program established by the Global Change Research Act of 1990.

NCADAC has just issued a 1,146 page draft report on climate change in the U.S., which is now available (for 3 months) for public review and comment. Following review by the National Academies of Sciences and by the public, NCADAC will revise its draft report and submit it to the Federal Government for consideration as the Third National Climate Assessment (NCA) Report. The first NCA Report was issued in 2000, and the second in 2009.

NCADAC describes the purpose of this draft NCA Report this way:

“The goal of this assessment report is to establish a scientific and credible foundation of information that is useful for a variety of science and policy applications related to managing risk and maximizing opportunities in a changing climate. The report also documents some societal responses to climate changes, and gives public and private decision-makers a better understanding of how climate change is affecting us now and what is in store for the future.”

The draft report covers every region of the US, and all significant systems in them: water resources, energy, transportation, agriculture, forestry, ecosystems, biodiversity, human health, land use, urban systems, infrastructure, tribal lands, rural communities and biogeochemical cycles. Four chapters near the end of the report discuss the crucial question of “what to do?”

These are: chapter 26 “Decision Support: Supporting Policy, Planning, and Resource Management Decisions in a Climate Change Context,” chapter 27 “Mitigation,” chapter 28 “Adaptation,” and chapter 29 “Research Agenda for Climate Change Science.” The last chapter, 30, describes the future plans for the NCA process, and this is followed by two appendices, which address commonly asked questions, and describe the science of climate change.

You can most easily savor the benefit of all the work that went into this report by reading the introductory “Letter to the American People,” which is three lines past a single page, and then reading at least the first ten pages of the 23 page Executive Summary. The 11 conclusions of this massive report are described in the Executive Summary (on pages 8-10), and these are very briefly listed here (as 11 direct quotes):

1. Global climate is changing, and this is apparent across the U.S. in a wide range of observations. The climate change of the past 50 years is due primarily to human activities, predominantly the burning of fossil fuels. (U.S. average temperature has increased by about 1.5°F since 1895, with more than 80% of this increase occurring since 1980.)

2. Some extreme weather and climate events have increased in recent decades, and there is new and stronger evidence that many of these increases are related to human activities.

3. Human-induced climate change is projected to continue and accelerate significantly if emissions of heat-trapping gases continue to increase.

4. Impacts related to climate change are already evident in many sectors and are expected to become increasingly challenging across the nation throughout this century and beyond. (Climate change is already affecting human health, infrastructure, water resources, agriculture, energy, the natural environment, and other factors – locally, nationally, and internationally.)

5. Climate change threatens human health and well-being in many ways, including impacts from increased extreme weather events, wildfire, decreased air quality, diseases transmitted by insects, food, and water, and threats to mental health. (Food security is emerging as an issue of concern, both within the U.S. and across the globe, and is affected by climate change.)

6. Infrastructure across the U.S. is being adversely affected by phenomena associated with climate change, including sea level rise, storm surge, heavy downpours, and extreme heat. (Sea level is projected to rise an additional 1 to 4 feet in this century.)

7. Reliability of water supplies is being reduced by climate change in a variety of ways that affect ecosystems and livelihoods in many regions, particularly the Southwest, the Great Plains, the Southeast, and the islands of the Caribbean and the Pacific, including the state of Hawai’i.

8. Adverse impacts to crops and livestock over the next 100 years are expected. Over the next 25 years or so, the agriculture sector is projected to be relatively resilient, even though there will be increasing disruptions from extreme heat, drought, and heavy downpours. U.S. food security and farm incomes will also depend on how agricultural systems adapt to climate changes in other regions of the world.

9. Natural ecosystems are being directly affected by climate change, including changes in biodiversity and location of species. As a result, the capacity of ecosystems to moderate the consequences of disturbances such as droughts, floods, and severe storms is being diminished.

10. Life in the oceans is changing as ocean waters become warmer and more acidic. (Warming ocean waters and ocean acidification across the globe and within U.S. marine territories are broadly affecting marine life.)

11. Planning for adaptation (to address and prepare for impacts) and mitigation (to reduce emissions) is increasing, but progress with implementation is limited. (In recent years, climate adaptation and mitigation activities have begun to emerge in many sectors and at all levels of government; however barriers to implementation of these activities are significant. The level of current efforts is insufficient to avoid increasingly serious impacts of climate change that have large social, environmental, and economic consequences.)

The era of climate change denial is over. This report amply documents the multidimensional reality of climate change as a force requiring an extensive and sustained national response in order to protect the lives and maintain the livelihoods of Americans. That response must have two aspects:

“mitigation,” minimizing the amount of global warming in the future by minimizing the anthropogenic emission of greenhouse gases now; and
“adaptation,” devising alterations (or alternatives) to the many systems we depend upon, so they continue to sustain us in a future with a different climate from that of previous centuries during which our prior economies and modes of living were developed.

Practical planning requires a basis of factual data. This latest NCADAC draft report on climate change is a sterling example of that reality, and it makes evident that climate change is rapidly enveloping the horizons of government planners and forward thinking individuals.

Between January 14 and April 12, you can tell Uncle Sam directly what you think about climate change by submitting your comments on the NCADAC draft report.

Manuel García, Jr. is a retired engineering-physicist and has long been interested in energy, both natural and technological. He blogs at http://manuelgarciajr.com, and his e-mail is mangogarcia@att.net.

[doom&gloom]

Re: Third National Climate Assessment Opened for Review

This is just perfect timing for the Administration to later open up a window and tackle 'climate change' with a 'carbon tax' that will disappear into the black hole of DC spending.

[don]

Re: Third National Climate Assessment Opened for Review

This is just perfect timing for the Administration to later open up a window and tackle 'climate change' with a 'carbon tax' that will disappear into the black hole of DC spending.

Can there not be an agenda. Cue FIRE . . .

[c1ue]

Re: Third National Climate Assessment Opened for Review

http://rogerpielkejr.blogspot.com/20...sgcrp-and.html

Summary: IPCC, the text of the report, and the headlines are in opposition.

The US Global Change Research Program has released a draft national assessment on climate change (here in PDF) and its impacts in the United States, as required by The US Global Change Research Act of 1990 (which incidentally was the subject of my 1994 PhD dissertation). There has been much excitement and froth in the media.

Here I explain that in an area where I have expertise on, extremes and their impacts, the report is well out of step with the scientific literature, including the very literature it cites and conclusions of the IPCC. Questions should (but probably won't) be asked about how a major scientific assessment has apparently became captured as a tool of advocacy via misrepresentation of the scientific literature -- a phenomena that occurs repeatedly in the area of extreme events. Yes, it is a draft and could be corrected, but a four-year effort by the nation’s top scientists should be expected to produce a public draft report of much higher quality than this.

Since these are strong allegations, let me illustrate my concerns with a specific example from the draft report, and here I will focus on the example of floods, but the problems in the report are more systemic than just this one case.

What the USGCRP report says:

Infrastructure across the U.S. is being adversely affected by phenomena associated with climate change, including sea level rise, storm surge, heavy downpours, and extreme heat… Floods along the nation’s rivers, inside cities, and on lakes following heavy downpours, prolonged rains, and rapid melting of snowpack are damaging infrastructure in towns and cities, farmlands, and a variety of other places across the nation.

The report clearly associates damage from floods with climate change driven by human activities. This is how the draft was read and amplified by The New York Times:

[T]he document minces no words.

“Climate change is already affecting the American people,” declares the opening paragraph of the report, issued under the auspices of the Global Change Research Program, which coordinates federally sponsored climate research. “Certain types of weather events have become more frequent and/or intense, including heat waves, heavy downpours, and, in some regions, floods and droughts."

To underscore its conclusion, the draft report includes the figure at the top of this post (from Hirsch and Ryberg 2011), which shows flood trends in different regions of the US. In a remarkable contrast to the draft USGCRP report, here is what Hirsch and Ryberg (2011) actually says:

The coterminous US is divided into four large regions and stationary bootstrapping is used to evaluate if the patterns of these statistical associations are significantly different from what would be expected under the null hypothesis that flood magnitudes are independent of GM [global mean] CO2. In none of the four regions defined in this study is there strong statistical evidence for flood magnitudes increasing with increasing GMCO2.

Got that? In no US region is there strong statistical evidence for flood magnitudes increasing with increasing CO2. This is precisely the opposite of the conclusion expressed in the draft report, which relies on Hirsch and Ryberg (2011) to express the opposite conclusion.

Want more? Here is what IPCC SREX, the recent assessment of extreme events, says (here in PDF):

There is limited to medium evidence available to assess climate-driven observed changes in the magnitude and frequency of floods at regional scales because the available instrumental records of floods at gauge stations are limited in space and time, and because of confounding effects of changes in land use and engineering. Furthermore, there is low agreement in this evidence, and thus overall low confidence at the global scale regarding even the sign of these changes.

The SREX is consistent with the scientific literature -- neither detection (of trends) nor attribution (of trends to human forcing of the climate system) has been achieved at the global -- much less regional or subregional -- levels. Yet, USGCRP concludes otherwise.

The leaked IPCC AR5 SOD reaffirms the SREX report and says (here in PDF), in addition to documenting a signal of earlier snowmelt in streamflows, no such signal of increasing floods has been found:

There continues to be a lack of evidence regarding the sign of trend in the magnitude and/or frequency of floods on a global scale

The IPCC has accurately characterized the underlying literature:

Observations to date provide no conclusive and general proof as to how climate change affects flood behaviour

Given the strength of the science on this subject, the USGCRP must have gone to some effort to mischaracterize it by 180 degrees. In areas where I have expertise, the flood example presented here is not unique in the report (e.g., Hurricane Sandy is mentioned 31 times).

Do note that just because the report is erroroneous in areas where I have expertise does not mean that it is incorrect in other conclusions. However, given the problematic and well-documented treatment of extremes in earlier IPCC and US government reports, I'd think that the science community would have its act together by now and stop playing such games.

So while many advocates in science and the media shout "Alarm" and celebrate its depiction of extremes, another question we should be asking is, how is it that it got things so wrong? Either the IPCC and the scientific literature is in error, or the draft USGCRP assessment is -- But don't take my word for it, check it out for yourself.