{"id":396,"date":"2009-04-25T07:13:43","date_gmt":"2009-04-25T11:13:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.easterbrook.ca\/steve\/?p=396"},"modified":"2009-06-15T15:17:08","modified_gmt":"2009-06-15T19:17:08","slug":"egu-roundup","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.easterbrook.ca\/steve\/2009\/04\/egu-roundup\/","title":{"rendered":"EGU Roundup"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Well, I had a fabulous week at the EGU. I tried to take in many different aspects of climate research, but inevitably ended up at lots of sessions on earth systems informatics (to satisfy my techie streak), and sessions looking at current cutting edge research on earth systems models, such as integrating weather forecast and climate models, model ensembles, and\u00a0probabilistic\u00a0predictions. Lots of interesting things going on in this space.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Here&#8217;s what I would regard as the major themes of the conference from my perspective:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><a title=\"EGU Press conference Web Stream\" href=\"http:\/\/www.h82.eu\/webstream\/egu2009\/index.php?modid=18&amp;a=show&amp;pid=30\" target=\"_blank\">Ocean Acidification<\/a>. It&#8217;s pretty easy to predict because it&#8217;s linear in the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere &#8211; i.e. there&#8217;s no uncertainty at all. When we kill off life in the seas we also lose a major carbon sink.<\/li>\n<li>Feedbacks. I learned at least <a title=\"Ray Bates' paper on feedback in climate systems\" href=\"http:\/\/dx.doi.org\/10.1002\/qj.62\" target=\"_blank\">nine different definitions of the word feedback<\/a>, and also that there are a huge number of feedbacks that we might want to put into an earth system model, so someone&#8217;s got to work out which ones are most likely to be important.<\/li>\n<li><a title=\"Thomas Stocker's talk abstract\" href=\"http:\/\/meetingorganizer.copernicus.org\/EGU2009\/EGU2009-14032.pdf\" target=\"_blank\">Abrupt Climate Change<\/a>. I learned that the\u00a0paleontological\u00a0record tells us that the earth is quite likely to be twitchy, and we still don&#8217;t know anywhere near enough about the triggers. Oh, and lots of climate scientists think we&#8217;ve already hit some of those triggers.<\/li>\n<li>Probabilistic forecasting. I learned a lot about the use of model ensembles (both multi-models, and perturbed physics experiments with single models) to quantify our uncertainties. There&#8217;s a strong move in the climate community to replace single predictions of climate change with\u00a0probabilistic\u00a0forecasts. The simplest\u00a0exposition\u00a0of this idea is MIT&#8217;s<a title=\"MIT's wheels of fortune\" href=\"http:\/\/globalchange.mit.edu\/resources\/gamble\/\" target=\"_blank\"> wheels of fortune<\/a>.<\/li>\n<li>Simpler targets for policy makers. I&#8217;m very taken with the analysis from Chris Jones and colleagues that show that if we want to stay below the 2\u00b0C temperature rise, we have a total budget of <a title=\"Chris Jones' talk abstract\" href=\"http:\/\/meetingorganizer.copernicus.org\/EGU2009\/EGU2009-13409.pdf\" target=\"_blank\">One Trillion Tonnes of Carbon<\/a> to emit, and since the dawn of industrialization, we used up more than half of it.\u00a0<\/li>\n<li><a title=\"Jason Blackstock's talk on geo-engineering\" href=\"http:\/\/meetingorganizer.copernicus.org\/EGU2009\/EGU2009-7678-2.pdf\" target=\"_blank\">Geo-Engineering<\/a>. Suddenly it&#8217;s okay for climate scientists to start talking about geo-engineering. For years, this has been anathema, on the basis that even just talking about this possibility can undermine the efforts to reduce carbon emissions (which is always the most sensible way to tackle the problem). But now it appears that many scientists have concluded that it&#8217;s too late anyway to do the right thing, and now we have to start thinking the unthinkable.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Plus some things that I missed that I wish I&#8217;d seen (based on what others told me afterwards):<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><a title=\"Stefan's web page\" href=\"http:\/\/www.pik-potsdam.de\/~stefan\/\" target=\"_blank\">Stefan Rahmstorf<\/a>&#8216;s views on the risks of an <a title=\"talk abstract\" href=\"http:\/\/meetingorganizer.copernicus.org\/EGU2009\/EGU2009-13120.pdf\" target=\"_blank\">abrupt shift in the ocean circulation<\/a>. Still, I consoled myself with this webcast from one of his talks last year:\u00a0<a title=\"Stefan's talk on sea level rise\" href=\"http:\/\/copportal1.man.poznan.pl\/Archive.aspx?EventID=53&amp;Lang=floor\" target=\"_blank\">A greater risk of sea level rise?<\/a>\u00a0(Stefan writes great stuff: this <a title=\"Rahmstorf on Abrupt Change\" href=\"http:\/\/www.pik-potsdam.de\/~stefan\/Publications\/Other\/rahmstorf_abrupt_change_2004.pdf\" target=\"_blank\">primer from 2004 on the risk of abrupt change<\/a> is fabulous).<\/li>\n<li>The session on <a title=\"session details\" href=\"http:\/\/meetingorganizer.copernicus.org\/EGU2009\/oral_programme\/142\" target=\"_blank\">The Cryosphere &#8211; for how much longer?<\/a>, particularly fellow Canadian\u00a0<a title=\"Luke's web pages\" href=\"http:\/\/www.uottawa.ca\/academic\/arts\/geography\/prof\/lcopland.htm\" target=\"_blank\">Luke Copland<\/a>&#8216;s talk on <a title=\"talk abstract\" href=\"http:\/\/meetingorganizer.copernicus.org\/EGU2009\/EGU2009-3237.pdf\" target=\"_blank\">accelerated collapse of the arctic ice shelves<\/a>; I&#8217;m told this was both spectacular and scary stuff.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Well, I had a fabulous week at the EGU. I tried to take in many different aspects of climate research, but inevitably ended up at lots of sessions on earth systems informatics (to satisfy my techie streak), and sessions looking at current cutting edge research on earth systems models, such as integrating weather forecast and [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":392,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27,72],"tags":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.easterbrook.ca\/steve\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/396"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.easterbrook.ca\/steve\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.easterbrook.ca\/steve\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.easterbrook.ca\/steve\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/392"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.easterbrook.ca\/steve\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=396"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.easterbrook.ca\/steve\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/396\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":619,"href":"https:\/\/www.easterbrook.ca\/steve\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/396\/revisions\/619"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.easterbrook.ca\/steve\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=396"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.easterbrook.ca\/steve\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=396"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.easterbrook.ca\/steve\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=396"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}