Climate Change Science Plan
Some Personal Reflections
By Charles Kennel,
Director of Scripps Institution of Oceanography
at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD)
Presented at the U.S. Climate Change Science Workshop
Wednesday, 5 December 2002, Marriott Wardman Park Hotel

National Research Council

• Global Environmental Change: Research Pathways for the Next Decade (1999)

• The Science of Regional and Global Change: Putting Knowledge to Work. (2001)

• Climate Change Science: An Analysis of Some Key Questions. (2001)

A New Organizational Focus

• Since "the current situation in the federal government does not sufficiently promote delivery of resources to key research, observational, and technological endeavors that either cross or transcend formal agency responsibilities",...

• The NRC's Committee on Global Change Research recommends "the establishment of an institutional arrangement positioned with sufficient authority to coordinate global and regional environmental research and decision-making...."

The Most Critical Accomplishment

• Explicit commitment to building decision support capacity

• Initial focus on resolving key climate change uncertainties in 2-4 years

• Strengthening observations, modeling, and data management

• Reasonable choice of issues, skepticism that all can be achieved in 2-4 years

A significant increase in breadth

• The new plan and structure enables a much stronger connection between "classical" global change research and ecosystem studies

• The new questions for basic biological and ecological sciences emerging from issues of global change have yet to be defined

The most profound innovation

• A new branch of technology has been created: Climate Change Technology"

• Climate change technology research now has an organizational focus at the same level as science

• Climate Change Science Plan does not yet anticipate the "technology pull" to come

  • Each major technology research thrust will make a demand on the sciences, and especially climate science

  • Scientific forecasts set the time-scale for deployment of technologies

  • Development and especially scale-up of any transformational technology will require ongoing scientific assessment of its global impact.

The USGCRP Science Plan is not as well-articulated as the CCRI

• The best defense against surprise is strong research

  • Greatest uncertainty lies in what we are unaware of not knowing

• The lack of a few unifying initiatives undervalues the role of science

• The notion that USGCRP science can lead to meaningful policy only in 5-15 years does not imply that we need not undertake meaningful initiatives in the next 2-4 years

• The present paucity of clear 2-4 year science priorities undermines the balance in the research-observation-information-decision support continuum

Some possible science initiatives

Do we need to encourage new (sub) disciplines?

• One example: it will soon be possible to investigate biogeochemical processes in the earth's crust, in oceanic sediments, in the sunlit upper ocean, in soils, on aerosols, and elsewhere, at the levels of microbial ecology, evolution, and genomics

• The microbes were the original planetary engineers (until humans came along)

National Academy of Sciences
Committee on Global Change Research
The Science of Regional and Global Change: Putting Knowledge to Work. (2001)