Remarkably, the UN organizations that oversee climate science and climate policy each use a different definition of "climate change." Here is why that matters.
Sorry I missed this earlier. These are such important issues, particularly the blind spot for acting to cut vulnerability with or without linking it to rising CO2. Yet I fear the path dependency in UNFCCC processes, and how those shape IPCC reports, is impossible to break at this point.
Without going into a lot of history of science, the gatekeepers of the funding and darlings of media attention have been modelers and prognosticators. The adapters… wildfire suppression and their associated scientific communities, water managers and their scientific communities, plant breeders, and so on are relatively invisible. Because whether it’s 10 40 or 70 percent climate change (and of course that’s actually unknown), on our timeframes and within our world it simply doesn’t matter. A small change would be to require academic publishers to have open peer review of any impact modeling by the affected adaptation communities.
I would add another point about event attribution. Single-event attribution reinforces the problem of figuring out what we are trying to adapt to. Few of the attribution studies of single extreme events that I have seen ascribe their occurence or characteristics (e.g. intensity, duration) *solely* to anthropogenic climate change. Taking the UNFCCC definition literally, we would only adapt to climate impacts attributable to anthropogenic climate change. As an example, an attribution study of the 2019-20 bushfires in Australia estimated that the probability of a fire weather index as high as in 2019-20 had increased by about 30% since 1900 due to anthropogenic climate change. So what is the policy lesson? We need only adapt to 30% of the impacts of severe bushfires? Of course we don't have that option - we have to adapt to the totality of such impacts.
Sorry I missed this earlier. These are such important issues, particularly the blind spot for acting to cut vulnerability with or without linking it to rising CO2. Yet I fear the path dependency in UNFCCC processes, and how those shape IPCC reports, is impossible to break at this point.
Without going into a lot of history of science, the gatekeepers of the funding and darlings of media attention have been modelers and prognosticators. The adapters… wildfire suppression and their associated scientific communities, water managers and their scientific communities, plant breeders, and so on are relatively invisible. Because whether it’s 10 40 or 70 percent climate change (and of course that’s actually unknown), on our timeframes and within our world it simply doesn’t matter. A small change would be to require academic publishers to have open peer review of any impact modeling by the affected adaptation communities.
I would add another point about event attribution. Single-event attribution reinforces the problem of figuring out what we are trying to adapt to. Few of the attribution studies of single extreme events that I have seen ascribe their occurence or characteristics (e.g. intensity, duration) *solely* to anthropogenic climate change. Taking the UNFCCC definition literally, we would only adapt to climate impacts attributable to anthropogenic climate change. As an example, an attribution study of the 2019-20 bushfires in Australia estimated that the probability of a fire weather index as high as in 2019-20 had increased by about 30% since 1900 due to anthropogenic climate change. So what is the policy lesson? We need only adapt to 30% of the impacts of severe bushfires? Of course we don't have that option - we have to adapt to the totality of such impacts.
Exactly!