Who feels the impacts of climate change?

Feeling affected by climate change related disasters has the potential to mobilize belief in climate change, concern about the issue, and support for mitigation policies – even when accounting for the effects of physically living through a disaster. In this study we use a two-wave survey design where respondents in the United States were interviewed before and after Hurricane Florence to better understand who feels affected by such disasters. First, we find that being worried about climate change increases the feeling of being affected by the hurricane among those who regularly discuss climate change. Second, we find that those who are high in perspective taking are more likely to feel affected. However, those who are high in empathic concern, but feel obligated to help victims of disasters, are less likely to feel affected. This suggests that hurricanes may cause a collapse of compassion, where those who are especially sensitive to the suffering of others down-regulate their emotional response to costly disasters.     

Assessing the potential impact of climate change on the UK’s electricity network

We investigate how weather affects the UK’s electricity network, by examining past data of weather-related faults on the transmission and distribution networks. By formalising the current relationship between weather-related faults and weather, we use climate projections from a regional climate model (RCM) to quantitatively assess how the frequency of these faults may change in the future. This study found that the incidences of both lightning and solar heat faults are projected to increase in the future. There is evidence that the conditions that cause flooding faults may increase in the future, but a reduction cannot be ruled out. Due to the uncertainty associated with future wind projections, there is no clear signal associated with the future frequency of wind and gale faults, however snow, sleet and blizzard faults are projected to decrease due to a reduction in the number of snow days.     

The ‘ultimate objective’ of the framework convention on climate change requires a new approach in climate change research

In the Framework Convention on Climate Change an ultimate objective is formulated that calls for stabilization of the concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere at a level that would allow ecosystems to adapt naturally, safeguard food supply and enable sustainable development to proceed in a sustainable manner. This paper addresses the possible contribution of science to translate this rather vague and ambiguous objective into more practicable terms. We propose a regionalized, risk-based six-step approach that couples an analysis of ecosystem vulnerability to the results of simulations of climate change. An ultimate objective level could be determined in terms of stabilized concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. The level and timing of this stabilization would be determined by a political appreciation of associated risks for managed and unmanaged ecosystems. These risks would be assessed by region in an internationally coordinated scientific effort, followed by a global synthesis.     

A note on the break‐up of lakes and rivers as indicators of climate change

Abstract

A detailed examination has been made of the relationship between the space and time variations of the Indian summer monsoon rainfall and the equatorial eastern‐Pacific sea surface temperature (SST) anomaly in different seasons for the 108‐year period, 1871–1978. There is a strong inverse relationship between the two. The correlation coefficients between All‐India monsoon rainfall and the sea surface temperature anomaly for the concurrent season; June, July and August (JJA) and for the succeeding seasons; September, October and November (SON) and December, January and February (DJF) are consistently and highly significant. Even a random sample of 50 years gave values significant at the 0.1 percent level. The sliding window correlation analysis of 10‐, 20‐ and 30‐year widths indicates that the relationships between All‐India monsoon rainfall and the sea surface temperature anomaly for the concurrent JJA and the succeeding SON and DJF seasons exhibit stability and consistency in significance. For contiguous meteorological sub‐divisions west of longitude 80°E the relationship is highly significant for JJA and for succeeding SON and DJF seasons.     

Investigating the impact of climate change on New York City’s primary water supply

Future climate scenarios projected by three different General Circulation Models and a delta-change methodology are used as input to the Generalized Watershed Loading Functions – Variable Source Area (GWLF-VSA) watershed model to simulate future inflows to reservoirs that are part of the New York City water supply system (NYCWSS). These inflows are in turn used as part of the NYC OASIS model designed to simulate operations for the NYCWSS. In this study future demands and operation rules are assumed stationary and future climate variability is based on historical data to which change factors were applied in order to develop the future scenarios. Our results for the West of Hudson portion of the NYCWSS suggest that future climate change will impact regional hydrology on a seasonal basis. The combined effect of projected increases in winter air temperatures, increased winter rain, and earlier snowmelt results in more runoff occurring during winter and slightly less runoff in early spring, increased spring and summer evapotranspiration, and reduction in number of days the system is under drought conditions. At subsystem level reservoir storages, water releases and spills appear to be higher and less variable during the winter months and are slightly reduced during summer. Under the projected future climate and assumptions in this study the NYC reservoir system continues to show high resilience, high annual reliability and relatively low vulnerability.     

Does socioeconomic status moderate the political divide on climate change? The roles of education,income, and individualism

Previous research documents that U.S. conservatives, and conservative white males in particular, tend to dismiss the threat of climate change more than others in the U.S. public. Other research indicates that higher education and income can each exacerbate the dismissive tendencies of the political Right. Bridging these lines of research, the present study examines the extent to which higher education and/or income moderate the ideological divide and the “conservative white male effect” on several climate change opinions, and whether these effects are mediated by an individualistic worldview (e.g., valuing individual liberty and limited government). Using nationally representative survey data of U.S. adults from 2008 to 2017 (N = 20,024), we find that across all beliefs, risk perceptions, and policy preferences examined, the ideological divide strengthens with both higher education and higher income. However, educational attainment plays a stronger role than income in polarizing the views of conservative white males. Further analyses support the hypothesis that differences in individualism partially explain the increased political polarization among more educated and higher-income adults, as well as greater dismissiveness among conservative white males relative to other demographic groups. These results highlight key moderators of opinion polarization, as well as ideological differences among conservatives, that are often overlooked in public discourse about climate change. Implications for climate change education and communication across demographic groups are considered.     

The new national climate change documents of Mexico: what do the regional climate change scenarios represent?

This paper presents a review of the methodology applied for generating the regional climate change scenarios utilized in important National Documents of Mexico, such as the Fourth National Communication to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the Fourth National Report to the Convention on Biological Diversity and The Economics of Climate Change in Mexico. It is shown that these regional climate change scenarios, which are one of the main inputs to support the assessments presented in these documents, are an example of the erroneous use of statistical downscaling techniques. The arguments presented here imply that the work based on such scenarios should be revised and therefore, these documents are inadequate for supporting national decision- making.     

Development of regional future climate change scenarios in South America using the Eta CPTEC/HadCM3 climate change projections: climatology and regional analyses for the Amazon, S?o Francisco and the Paraná River basins

The objective of this study is to assess the climate projections over South America using the Eta-CPTEC regional model driven by four members of an ensemble of the Met Office Hadley Centre Global Coupled climate model HadCM3. The global model ensemble was run over the twenty-first century according to the SRES A1B emissions scenario, but with each member having a different climate sensitivity. The four members selected to drive the Eta-CPTEC model span the sensitivity range in the global model ensemble. The Eta-CPTEC model nested in these lateral boundary conditions was configured with a 40-km grid size and was run over 1961–1990 to represent baseline climate, and 2011–2100 to simulate possible future changes. Results presented here focus on austral summer and winter climate of 2011–2040, 2041–2070 and 2071–2100 periods, for South America and for three major river basins in Brazil. Projections of changes in upper and low-level circulation and the mean sea level pressure (SLP) fields simulate a pattern of weakening of the tropical circulation and strengthening of the subtropical circulation, marked by intensification at the surface of the Chaco Low and the subtropical highs. Strong warming (4–6°C) of continental South America increases the temperature gradient between continental South America and the South Atlantic. This leads to stronger SLP gradients between continent and oceans, and to changes in moisture transport and rainfall. Large rainfall reductions are simulated in Amazonia and Northeast Brazil (reaching up to 40%), and rainfall increases around the northern coast of Peru and Ecuador and in southeastern South America, reaching up to 30% in northern Argentina. All changes are more intense after 2040. The Precipitation–Evaporation (P–E) difference in the A1B downscaled scenario suggest water deficits and river runoff reductions in the eastern Amazon and S?o Francisco Basin, making these regions susceptible to drier conditions and droughts in the future.     

Analysis and farmers’ perception of climate change in the Kashmir Valley,India

Theoretical and Applied Climatology - Analysis of climatic variables is important for the detection and attribution of climate change trends and has received considerable attention from researchers...     

Will climate change impact on wind power development in the UK?

Partly in response to concerns about anthropogenic climate change, renewable energy production is growing rapidly in the United Kingdom (UK). The wind power industry takes advantage of the country having some of the highest mean wind speeds in Europe. Future climate change, however, has the potential to alter the characteristics of the UK wind climate. Small changes in mean wind speed could produce much greater changes in wind energy output as the power generated is related to the cube of wind speed. This paper aims to use a simple method to provide insight into projected future UK wind climate and how this might differ from current patterns. A discussion of the scale of the projected impacts on the wind energy industry follows.     

Bridging science and community knowledge? The complicating role of natural variability in perceptions of climate change

Although the spatial and temporal scales on which climate varies is a prominent aspect of climate research in the natural sciences, its treatment in the social sciences remains relatively underdeveloped. The result is limited understanding of the public's capacity to perceive climate variability as distinct from change, and uncertainty surrounding how and when to best communicate information on variability/change. Ignoring variability in favour of change-focused analyses and language risks significant misrepresentation of public perception and knowledge, and precludes detailed synthesis of data from the social and natural sciences. An example is presented based on a regional comparison of variability-dominated climate observations and change-focused survey data, collected in western Newfoundland (Canada). This region experiences pronounced, slow-varying natural variability, which acted to obscure broader climate trends through the 1980s and 1990s; since the late 1990s, the same variability has amplified apparent change. While survey results confirm residents perceive regional climate change, it is not clear whether respondents distinguish variability from change. This presents uncertainty in the best approach to climate science communication in this region, and raises concern that subsequent variability-driven transient cooling will erode public support for climate action. Parallels are drawn between these regional concerns and similar uncertainty surrounding treatment of variability in discussion of global temperature trends, highlighting variability perception as a significant gap in human dimensions of climate change research.     

Do international factors influence the passage of climate change legislation?

The number of climate change laws in major economies has grown from less than 40 in 1997 to almost 500 at the end of 2013. The passage of these laws is influenced by both domestic and international factors. This article reviews the main international factors, drawing on a powerful new dataset of climate legislation in 66 national jurisdictions. We find that the propensity to legislate on climate change is heavily influenced by the passage of similar laws elsewhere, suggesting a strong and so far under-appreciated role for international policy diffusion. International treaties such as the Kyoto Protocol work in two ways. The impact of the Kyoto Protocol itself is limited to countries with formal obligations under the treaty. In addition, the prestige of hosting an international climate summit is associated with a subsequent boost in legislation. Legislators seem to respond to the expectations of climate leadership that these events bestow on their host.

Policy relevance

A global solution to climate change will ultimately have to be anchored in domestic legislation, which creates the legal basis for countries to take action. Countries are passing climate legislation in a growing number. This article asks to what extent they are motivated to do so by international factors, such as existing treaty obligations. We find that the Kyoto Protocol has been a less important factor in explaining climate legislation outside Annex I than the passage of similar laws elsewhere. This suggests that international policy diffusion plays an important and so far under-appreciated role in global climate policy, complementing formal treaty obligations.     

Effects of “realistic” land-cover change on a greenhouse-warmed African climate

The primary goal of this investigation is to focus on a realistic scenario for simulating impacts on regional African climate of future deforestation in a greenhouse-warmed world. Combined effects of plausible land-cover change and greenhouse warming are assessed by time-slice simulations with an atmospheric general circulation model (AGCM) for the middle of the twenty first century. Three time-slice integrations have been performed with the ARPEGE-Climat AGCM incorporating a zooming technique to achieve a resolution of about 100 km over Africa. A control run for the current climate is forced by observed climatological sea surface temperatures (SSTs) and the observed vegetation distribution is specified from a new vegetation database, in order to improve the geographical distribution and properties of the vegetation cover. Future SST changes are derived from a transient coupled atmosphere–ocean simulation for scenario B2 of the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Future vegetation changes are specified from a simulation of scenario B2 with the Integrated Model to Assess the Global Environment (IMAGE) developed at the National Institute of Public Health and the Environment in the Netherlands (RIVM). The results show that land surface processes can locally modulate greenhouse warming effects for African climate, with reductions of surface transpiration and small increases of surface temperature. Deforestation of tropical Africa has overall only a marginal effect on precipitation because of a compensatory increase in moisture convergence. Energy budget analyses show that increases in surface temperature are produced both by increases of greenhouse gases (GHG) concentration from the increase in downward atmospheric longwave radiation, and by African tropical deforestation from the resulting reduction in transpiration. This study indicates that realistic land-use changes, though of smaller amplitude than greenhouse gas forcing, may have a small regional effect in projections of future climate.     

Erratum to: Simulating the impacts of climate change, prices and population on California’s residential electricity consumption

We discovered an error in the computer code generating the simulation results in section 5 of Auffhammer and Aroonruengsawat (Clim Chang 109(Supplement 1):191–210, 2011). While four out of five main findings are unaffected, the simulated impacts of climate change on annual residential electricity consumption are an order of magnitude smaller, which is consistent with findings in the previous literature.     

The danger of overvaluing methane’s influence on future climate change

Minimizing the future impacts of climate change requires reducing the greenhouse gas (GHG) load in the atmosphere. Anthropogenic emissions include many types of GHG’s as well as particulates such as black carbon and sulfate aerosols, each of which has a different effect on the atmosphere, and a different atmospheric lifetime. Several recent studies have advocated for the importance of short timescales when comparing the climate impact of different climate pollutants, placing a high relative value on short-lived pollutants, such as methane (CH₄) and black carbon (BC) versus carbon dioxide (CO₂). These studies have generated confusion over how to value changes in temperature that occur over short versus long timescales. We show the temperature changes that result from exchanging CO₂ for CH₄ using a variety of commonly suggested metrics to illustrate the trade-offs involved in potential carbon trading mechanisms that place a high value on CH₄ emissions. Reducing CH₄ emissions today would lead to a climate cooling of approximately ~0.5 °C, but this value will not change greatly if we delay reducing CH₄ emissions by years or decades. This is not true for CO₂, for which the climate is influenced by cumulative emissions. Any delay in reducing CO₂ emissions is likely to lead to higher cumulative emissions, and more warming. The exact warming resulting from this delay depends on the trajectory of future CO₂ emissions but using one business-as usual-projection we estimate an increase of 3/4 °C for every 15-year delay in CO₂ mitigation. Overvaluing the influence of CH₄ emissions on climate could easily result in our “locking” the earth into a warmer temperature trajectory, one that is temporarily masked by the short-term cooling effects of the CH₄ reductions, but then persists for many generations.     

High impact,low probability? An empirical analysis of risk in the economics of climate change

To what extent does economic analysis of climate change depend on low-probability, high-impact events? This question has received a great deal of attention lately, with the contention increasingly made that climate damage could be so large that societal willingness to pay to avoid extreme outcomes should overwhelm other seemingly important assumptions, notably on time preference. This paper provides an empirical examination of some key theoretical points, using a probabilistic integrated assessment model. New, fat-tailed distributions are inputted for key parameters representing climate sensitivity and economic costs. It is found that welfare estimates do strongly depend on tail risks, but for a set of plausible assumptions time preference can still matter.