IP: Schneider speaks January 9th on Global Warming (Correction)

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

> Date: Mon, 7 Jan 2002 08:15:53 -0800 (PST)
> To: farber () cis upenn edu
> From: allison () stanford edu
>
>         Computer Systems Laboratory Colloquium
>           4:15PM, Wednesday, Jan 09, 2002
>     NEC Auditorium, Gates Computer Science Building B03
>        http://www.stanford.edu/class/ee380
>
> Topic:    The Global Warming Controversy
>           Can we separate scientific signal from political noise
>
> Speaker:  Steven Schneider
>           Stanford University
>
> About the talk:
>
> Inordinate contention attends complex socio-technical problems
> like global warming. The polarized extremes (end of the world
> versus good for us) are, I believe, the two lowest probability
> cases, yet they dominate media and political debates and
> editorial pages. No responsible scientist would claim to have
> precise expectations about our climatic future, its implications
> for nature and our lives or the costs of doing something about
> it. Nevertheless, a great deal of consensus exists about many
> aspects of the topic, despite the large uncertainties which
> accompany other components.
>
> A half-dozen pieces of circumstantial evidence were sufficient
> for the 100-scientist Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
> (IPCC) to assert in 1995: "the balance of evidence suggests that
> there is a discernible human influence on global climate". The
> 2000AD IPCC assessment, while strengthening this conclusion based
> on five more years data and analysis, has brought to the
> forefront a new discernible statement: this time that recent
> observations of regional climate changes and the movements of
> wildlife, marine systems, ice extent and the timing of vegetation
> life cycles are becoming clear enough in the past few
> decades--very likely to be the warmest in at least
> 1000years---that there now appears to be a discernible impact of
> regional climatic variations on natural systems.
>
> The prime implications of this new finding is that as the climate
> continues to change--and change may be expected to accelerate
> substantially in the 21st century--we can expect natural systems
> to become highly stressed. I will try to distinguish which are
> the well known components of the debate, contrast them to the
> over-contentious media/political debate, and put this problem in
> the context of so-called Integrated Assessment of policy
> responses to the advent or prospect of global warming.
>
> International scientific assessments have for decades emphasized
> the necessity of treating uncertainties in their reports to
> governments contemplating policy options to deal with the advent
> or prospect of human-induced climatic changes. The most recent
> Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Third Assessment
> Report (TAR) is now completed, and unlike previous reports there
> is a formal guidance paper(prepared by Richard Moss and Stephen
> Schneider after three rounds of review) which recommends
> strategies to explicitly account for uncertainties. Although some
> might expect this to be welcome news to scientists, a number of
> authors--particularly physical scientists from developed
> countries--have somewhat resisted the notion of expressing
> quantitative subjective probabilities to characterize
> uncertainty. Nevertheless, without probabilities atttached (even
> highly subjective ones), any outcomes projected cannot be put
> into a risk-management framework, and the nature of this
> conundrum will be highlighted.
>
> [Professor Schneider has published a critical essay review of Lommborg's
> contoversial book, The Skeptical Environmentalist, in the January 2002
> issue of Scientific American.  He's promised to include some of his
> observations about the failings of Lomborg's book and the way by which
> scientific investigations must be done in order to reach defensible
> conclusiuons.  -dra]
>
> About the speaker:
>
> Stephen Schneider is a Professor in the Department of Biological
> Sciences and a Senior Fellow at the Institute for International
> Studies at Stanford University. He is editor of Climactic Change
> and the Encyclopedia of Climate and Weather and the lead author
> of several IPCC chapters and the IPCC guidance paper on
> uncertainties.
>
> Stephen Schneider published an essay in the January 2002 issue of
> Scientific American which gives critical review of a portion of
> Bjørn Lomborg's controversial book,The Skeptical Environmentalist.
>
> Contact information:
>
> Stephen Schneider
> Stanford University
> shs () stanford edu

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