More flooding predicted for parts of the UK.AlamyScientists in London yesterday delivered unprecedented regional climate projections for the United Kingdom, detailing how the nation — piece by piece, in sections measuring just 25 square kilometres — will probably be affected by climate change. The projections, which update the findings of the UK Climate Impacts Programme (UKCIP) from 2002, are the first of their kind worldwide.
Produced for the UK government in the hope of enabling citizens and local authorities to adapt to the changes that lie ahead, the results represent "the most comprehensive and credible attempt yet at probabilistic climate projections", says James Murphy, head of predicting climate change at the UK Met Office, based in Exeter.
Their main message is that without substantial efforts to cut global greenhouse-gas emissions, Britons could be in for a hard time by the 2080s. Although the risk of flooding will worsen in the North West of the country, the South East will face an anticipated 22% decline in summer rainfall. Depending on the rate of future emissions, London could see a temperature increase of between 2°C and 6°C, and as much as a 36-centimetre rise in local sea levels.
Most projections, such as those produced by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), offer information on likely climate effects at a subcontinental scale of around 300 km2. Regional decadal-scale projections have recently been produced for the United States at a resolution of 25 km2 (see 'Hot times ahead for the Wild West'). But the UKCIP's approach takes projections to a new level, covering long-term climate change for the whole nation at the scale of 25 km2 and, in some cases, resolving weather patterns down to a scale of 5 km2.
"It's one step better than what you get from the IPCC at the global scale," says Jacqueline McGlade, executive director of the Copenhagen-based European Environment Agency. "We're getting more discrimination now between the south and the north and there are distinct differences."
Stretching the scales?
To resolve how changes in variables such as rainfall and temperature might play out on a much finer scale, scientists from the Met Office and the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA), among others, tried a novel approach — one not yet published in the peer-reviewed literature.
First, they sampled data from 400 variations of a climate model developed by the Met Office Hadley Centre, to systematically capture all of the known uncertainties in long-term climate trends. They then excluded versions of the model that performed poorly at reproducing past climate to narrow the projections to those from reliable models.
DEFRA's chief scientist Bob Watson says that he expects the approach "will be taken up by other regions and highlighted by the IPCC in their next report".
“Current climate science might support projections on a scale of couple of thousand kilometres, but anything smaller than that is uncharted territory.”
Myles Allen
University of Oxford
Originally slated for release in November 2008, the projections were delayed by an independent review commissioned late last year to check the methodology. University of Oxford climatologist Myles Allen, who was on the review committee, worries that the results are "stretching the ability of current climate science".
His main concern is that the UKCIP report goes well beyond what the IPCC considers possible in terms of the spatial and temporal scales at which climate effects can be reliably resolved. "Current climate science might support projections on a scale of couple of thousand kilometres, but anything smaller than that is uncharted territory," says Allen.
McGlade says that although the European Environment Agency endorses the 25-km2 climate projections issued by the UKCIP, "below 25 km the statistical noise in the data render them of no practical use".
Climate lottery
In another break from the conventional IPCC methodology, the report gives probabilities for how likely it is that regional events, such as heat waves, will occur. Some fear that this worthwhile attempt at clarity could be misinterpreted. "These results have the potential to be very useful, but the main issue is how they will be used," says Suraje Dessai, an expert on climate-change adaptation at the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, headquartered in Norwich, UK. "The real danger is that end users will start to optimize systems based on the most likely outcome," he says.
ADVERTISEMENT
Robert Lempert, an expert in risk and uncertainty management at the RAND Corporation — a non-profit research organization based in Santa Monica — agrees. "There are two dangers with using very precise information for adaptation," says Lempert. "People believe it too much. Or else it becomes a lightning rod — if someone doesn't like the implications of the forecast, they can point to the imprecision."
As a precautionary warning I'd rather have science a bit stretched to the limits of its capabilities, than a conservative rendition of risks. Besides, the IPCC has not accounted for the more contemporary evidence revealed by studies released after their cutting point. I'd rather be warned of a greater risk than the one that will likely materialize, to be warned of a risk smaller than the probable hazard to come.
I wonder how they will make such precise predictions for 2080 when the same organisation cant forecast the summer weather for 2009 a couple of months ahead? 30 April 2009 Summer Forecast 2009 Met Office "The coming summer is 'odds on for a barbecue summer'". They didn't forecast snow in June though. "Their main message is that without substantial efforts to cut global greenhouse-gas emissions, Britons could be in for a hard time by the 2080s." The AGW alarmists get more shrill and frantic in their messages even as their predictions diverge more and more from reality and evidence mounts of a cooling Earth in the face of ever increasing CO2 emissions. Could it be that in fact with substantial efforts to cut global greenhouse-gas emissions, Britons could be in for a hard time well before the 2080s and that, on the balance, CO2 emissions are doing far more good than harm to the environment?
To suggest the models are capable of giving any meaningful information at the 25 Km scale is misleading. The IPCC model results are always presented as the difference relative to a fixed period. When you look at absolute values (degree C and mm precipitation) you see that changes they are projecting are smaller than the errors in the models. See: http://www.climatedata.info/Temperature/temperature.html and http://www.climatedata.info/Precipitation/precipitation.html
A scale of 25km for such a complex prediction seems hardly credible. I see great problems for homeowners when the insurance companies start charging extra premiums for events that have thus far never happened but are predicted by a currently en vogue scientific paper.
If the temperature in London rises, on average, by 6 Centigrade this whole prediction will be completely useless - because in this case, the see level will not rise by 60 cm only, but London will be 60 meters under water, because the large ice sheets around the poles will melt.
ALL models are wrong. That doesn't mean they aren't useful (we hold mental models of how the world works in our head, and they often work out fine for getting us through the day). Richard Dawson wrote: "I wonder how they will make such precise predictions for 2080 when the same organisation cant forecast the summer weather for 2009 a couple of months ahead? 30 April 2009 Summer Forecast 2009 Met Office "The coming summer is 'odds on for a barbecue summer'". They didn't forecast snow in June though." Dawson would be well served to understand the difference between climate and weather. Think of it in terms of a regression, where the slope represents climate and the residuals that of weather. Predicting a balmy summer doesn't preclude there being snow in June, only that 'on average' the temperatures will be warm.
Researchers should make some predictions and then bet on them in an electronic market. Then we'll know if they have some skin in the game. I don't know who to trust. I believe CO2 is anthropogenic and that humans deliver this to the atmosphere. But we have to have some signature of this. The joules in the oceans sounds appropriate and Argos seems to fit the bill; but it would be nice to see warming in the low latitude upper troposphere too. It has to warm, doesn't it? Also it seems that CO2 may have done about as much as it can...with its declining logrithmic effect. Fighting this involves huge upfront costs in the form of foregone goods and services. GDP will become lower. We take options away from the producers. Maybe it's better to leave a rich society for our heirs? and let them fight any damage with more resources? William Palmer