Department of Environmental Earth System Science Seminar:
Socio-Climactic Analysis, Modeling, and Prediction: A Climate Dynamics View of Earth System Science
Noah S. Diffenbaugh
Interim Director, Purdue Climate Change Research Center
When: 12:15pm, Wednesday, November 12th
Where: Yang and Yamazaki Energy and Environmental Building, Room 111
Refreshments served at noon
***Students and post docs are invited to lunch with the speaker, 1:30-2:30pm, Y2E2 Room 105 ***
World leaders are currently facing a potential “perfect storm” of crises, including economic recession, energy dependence, global warming, and international conflict. Claims by some of these leaders that the environmental sustainability of human civilization may be at risk create a critical need to (a) understand and predict how interactions between climatic, economic, social, and political conditions dictate the environmental vulnerability of human populations, and (b) quantitatively assess the costs and benefits of different intervention strategies.
Most of the emphasis in the IPCC process has been placed on large-scale climate changes, with far less attention paid to the role of fine-scale climate processes. In order to test the importance of these fine-scale climate dynamics, we have generated the most detailed multi-decadal, continental-scale climate projections currently in the literature. We find that although key biases exist in the climate simulations, our high-resolution modeling system captures the basic patterns of climate means and extremes. In addition, we find substantial spatial heterogeneity in the response of climate to elevated greenhouse forcing, with fine-scale climate dynamics regulating the pattern and magnitude of climate change in South Asia, the United States, and the Mediterranean region.
We also find that elevated greenhouse forcing could produce substantial changes in a number of natural and human systems (including premium wine production, agricultural pest prevalence, and snowmelt runoff), and that there is important spatial heterogeneity in the magnitude of potential impact. In particular, the potential impacts are largest where critical thresholds are crossed, with fine-scale climate processes amplifying the climate change — and therefore the impacts — in many regions. We also find that in some cases lower emissions trajectories prevent these critical thresholds from being crossed, suggesting that emissions deceleration can mitigate climate change impacts, but also that this deceleration effect is neither spatially nor temporally uniform.
Understanding and addressing these and other socioclimatic vulnerabilities demands a major international initiative to meet the grand challenge of socioclimatic analysis, modeling, and prediction. I propose development a revolutionary scientific technology capable of accurately predicting the socioclimatic exposure faced by individuals, communities, and nations. Such a capacity does not yet exist anywhere in the world, primarily due to the highly interdisciplinary nature of the problem, as well as the fundamental cyberinfrastructure challenges faced in creating a fully unified computational framework. However, by building an integrated, collaborative team of climate scientists, ecologists, economists, social scientists and computer engineers, the community will be capable of creating a novel socioclimatic analysis, modeling, and prediction system. Although ambitious, this effort will ultimately provide the basis for identifying possible future socioclimatic stresses, and for evaluating different policy options.