New Heads for New People
February 2, 2016

Jackie Sojico and Malcolm Rosenthal talk about what happens when science leaves the lab and ends up in the real world. Roger Pielke, Jr. is interviewed on the history and politics of “basic research.”

Listen to the podcast.

Washington Times
January 20, 2016

Federal climate scientists announced Wednesday that 2015 was the hottest year on record, simultaneously heating up another round in the global-warming debate as climate skeptics quickly challenged the findings.

Even as the East Coast braced for a mammoth snowstorm, the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration and NASA found that last year’s globally averaged temperature hit a 136-year high, driven by an unusually strong El Nino weather pattern combined with carbon dioxide emissions.

Scientists at NOAA found that the average 2015 temperature of 58.62 degrees Fahrenheit passed the record-breaking 2014 average by a record margin of 0.29 degrees, or 1.62 degrees above the 20th century average.

The numbers were slightly different at NASA, which uses another measurement; NASA analysts estimated that 2015 was 0.23 degrees warmer than 2014 and 1.6 degrees higher than last century’s average.

“This trend will continue; it will continue because we understand why it’s happening,” Gavin Schmidt, director of the NASA Goddard Institute of Space Studies, told the Associated Press. “It’s happening because the dominant force is carbon dioxide.”

Climate-change activists said Wednesday the new numbers only underscore the importance of honoring the national pledges in the global climate accord reached by President Obama and other world leaders in Paris last month.

But while climate-change groups responded by doubling down on calls to reduce CO2 emissions, climate skeptics challenged the agency methodology and noted that the results were actually cooler than climate-model projections.

“2015 Was Not Even Close to the Hottest Year on Record,” said James Taylor, Heartland Institute senior fellow for environment policy, in a Wednesday op-ed for Forbes.

He argued that satellite temperatures show 1998 was the warmest year on record since 1979, and noted that the 136 years of record-keeping fail to take into account other indicators showing “temperatures have been warmer than today for most of the past several thousand years.”

Skeptics also argued that climate models show that last year’s temperatures should have been even higher, given the El Nino factor.

“Yes, 2015 was warm. It ‘smashed’ the previous record because of a strong El Nino,” said Chip Knappenberger, assistant director of the Center for the Study of Science at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, in an email.

“Yet, despite breaking the old global temperatures ‘by far,’ the observations only approached the climate model projections for the temperature of an ‘average’ year for 2015,” he said. “In other words, climate models continue to run too hot.”

He referred to the discrepancy between climate models and actual temperatures as “lukewarming.”

Roger Pielke Jr., environmental studies professor at the University of Colorado Boulder, said that there were fewer extreme weather events despite the warm temperatures. Climate-change groups have argued that global warming contribute to hurricanes and other weather-related disasters.

“It’d be great if just one journalist (any!) would note that 2015 — warmest year ever — also had the lowest catastrophe losses in a generation,” Mr. Pielke said on Twitter. Read more …

UC Davis’ Pamela Ronald, CU Boulder’s Roger Pielke, Jr., and Arizona State’s Daniel Sarewitz — weigh in below.

The Breakthrough Institute
January 7, 2016

Earlier this week, Phillip A. Sharp and Alan Leshner argued in the New York Times that we need a new ‘Green Revolution,’ a step-change in agricultural productivity. The United States achieved tremendous productivity gains over the 20th century, the two science advocates argue, but…

Maintaining this level of productivity has been quite a challenge in recent years and is likely to become more difficult over the next few decades as weather patterns, available water and growing seasons shift further and threats of invasive weeds, pests and pathogens rise.

If agriculture is to have any chance of answering these challenges, we must have new and improved techniques and technologies. The problem is that agricultural innovation has not kept pace.

They go on to point to a crisis in productivity improvements and funding for agricultural innovation. Are they right? Three Breakthrough Senior Fellows — UC Davis’ Pamela Ronald, CU Boulder’s Roger Pielke, Jr., and Arizona State’s Daniel Sarewitz — weigh in. Read more …

CIRES News
December 16, 2015

The 2015 Paris Climate Conference (also known as COP21 – the 21st meeting of the conference of parties ) ended with an agreement this past Saturday. Several of our CIRES and NOAA colleagues attended the conference, including Marilyn Averill from the Center for Science and Technology Policy Research and the Getches Wilkinson Center for Natural Resources, Energy and the Environment. Below is a short Q&A with her about the two weeks she spent in Paris.

Q) What was your role at COP21?

This is my fourteenth COP! My first was at the Hague in 2000 and I’ve been to every one since 2003. Since Copenhagen, in 2009, I’ve been a member of the steering committee for the RINGOs [Research and Independent Non-governmental Organisations to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change] and I ran their daily meetings at COP 21.

There’s so much going on at the COP that there’s no way one person can keep track of it all, so these meetings help keep people up to date on what’s happening around the negotiations. It’s a good home base for a lot of researchers and a way for people to share information about events they’ve gone to and to network with each other.

Q) Fourteen COPs! How was this one different?

It was different right from the outset because there was an actual agreement that people expected would be adopted. The closest to this was Copenhagen, where there were extremely high hopes that an agreement would be reached. It was disappointing when Copenhagen didn’t pan out but that meeting really got people engaged. This time, the negotiations were much further along. There was a huge amount of optimism going in, along with fears that we might not reach agreement, and there was payoff this time.

Q) What were some of the big topics that came up in this meeting?

Laurent Fabius, the French foreign minister and president of COP21, highlighted three issues:

1. Differentiation. This is the idea of common but differentiated responsibilities. This is the first time that developing countries were asked to make commitments.  Basically, each country brought their own goals for carbon reduction to the table, but there were differences of opinion about just how much differentiation should be attached to various parts of the agreement. Getting commitments from all these different countries – and especially China – was huge, even though each country is making the decision only for itself. Of course, there’s no enforcement system to hold these countries to their commitments – that’s where NGOs can step in. It’s their role to make sure their countries are accountable and keep increasing their levels of commitment.
2. Finance. There’s so little funding available to meet these goals and any action we take requires money. It’s been emphasized that all countries have a right to develop. But developing nations will need help if they’re going to develop in a sustainable way. That means the governments of developed nations as well as the private sector will both have to step in.
3. Ambition. The target has been to keep global warming below 2°C. The developing world wants that target even lower, at 1.5°C. And we have increasing information about the kinds of injuries that will occur between the 1.5° and 2° level, like the disappearance of some small islands states, damage to agriculture. There’s a sentiment in the developing world that if you use 2°C as the target, you’re writing off those who will be injured as the temperature rises between 1.5 and 2 degrees. The Paris Agreement aims to hold the temperature increase to well below 2°C, and to try to keep warming below 1.5°C.

This agreement isn’t going to save the world by itself. It’s just putting us on the pathway. We’ll need to do more and ratchet up the ambition, find the money, put the work in to keep climate change to levels where there will be fewer injuries. And universities will have key roles in this – climate research, capacity building, innovation, communication, and accountability. Read more …

The Week
December 15, 2015

by Jeff Spross

This weekend, international leaders managed to hammer out a deal for how to tackle climate change. And on the surface, it’s not hard to see why naysayers on both the left and right are declaring it a giant nothingburger.

The agreement is largely voluntary: 187 countries submit pledges to reduce greenhouse gas emissions based on what they think they can handle. Most of the structure the deal provides is a regular process to check in on progress and revise goals. If all the current pledges stick, global warming this century will likely be between 2.7 and 3.5 degrees Celsius — well above the 2 degrees Celsius threshold considered safe, and the agreement’s ideal goal of 1.5 degrees.

But maybe the most daunting thing is the sheer scale of the change the global economy must undergo to get warming under control.

Here, for instance, is Roger Pielke, Jr.’s analysis of how much global power consumption comes from green sources now, and where it needs to go by the last quarter of the 21st century:

Read more …

by Dr. Gesa Luedecke

Climate Matters
December 15, 2015

My twitter account has slowed down during the second week of COP21. Was it because no one had new stories to tell from Paris? Did my contacts all leave the conference? If so, with what feelings?

As person that hasn’t been to the summit and therefore was unable to directly pick up the notion of the conference, I am going to write down my thoughts gathered from reading the news coverage and features during COP21. I have been overwhelmed with all the information coming from Le Bourget, through seemingly endless media channels – news, features, background stories, blogs, tweets and so on.

At this conference, the pressure on countries to act has increased. This time the media convey more than ever, that climate change is an issue and Paris an opportunity that requires more attention than in the past years. Almost a decade ago, I did an internship at the German Greenpeace headquarter. At the time some colleagues had started working on a climate refugee report, which back then, sounded like science fiction to me.

Unfortunately our world has changed a lot and we are now facing multiple major crises: climate change, refugee and terrorism intertwining into a perfect storm. For the first time at a COP, all countries seem to be ready to have a conversation about how to shape the future’s energy production and consumption.

Rather than relying on national leaders however, civic engagement appears to be providing the more promising momentum among all international efforts to reach binding pledges below the 2 degrees Celsius warming limit. Earlier last week on this media watch blog, Professor Hans von Storch wrote, “Six years after Copenhagen we continue on our high-speed train into the abyss.” I like this metaphor but have to add, if it only was a train and not an SUV running on fossil fuel, we would definitively be moving closer towards our climate pledges. Read more …

Beyond Cop21Paris: Climate Science & Policy

How on Earth
KGNU Science Show
December 8, 2015

Changing Climate, Changing Policy (start time: 7:06): As political leaders are still hammering out an accord at the UN Climate Summit, or COP21, in Paris, to rein in global warming, today we discuss the underlying scientific facts about climate change, and the policy promises and challenges for our future. Hosts Susan Moran and Daniel Glick interview two Colorado scientists at the intersection of science and policy. Dr. Waleed Abdalati is a geoscientist and director of the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES), a partnership between the University of Colorado-Boulder and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Dr. Lisa Dilling is an associate professor of environmental studies, also at CIRES, who brings expertise in science policy related to climate issues. She directs The Western Water Assessment, a NOAA program that provides information for policy makers throughout the Intermountain West about the region’s vulnerabilities to climate change impacts. Contributing host Daniel Glick was an editor of the 2014 National Climate Assessment, and his team has produced videos on the immediate and human impacts of climate change. Listen to the show.