Climate and Society

Humankind is both driver of and responder to climate in its pursuit of well-being. Anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases affect the heat balance of the earth and the direct exploitation of natural resources has significant impact on climate. Conversely, changing patterns of precipitation, temperature extremes, increased frequency of storms, and rising sea level determine the limits of societal development.

While the dynamic interaction between humans and climate is not new, the scale of the interaction has reached unprecedented proportions. Climate change adds to and actively interacts with a variety of other environmental problems that have been caused by overusing natural resources. For example, population increases lead to a panoply of problems, including water stress, deforestation, air pollution, and soil mismanagement and erosion. In combination with climate change, these stressors directly impact society in many ways, including food production, floods and droughts, and disease and its spread.

Development choices in both industrialized and developing nations must consider both sides of the climate-human interaction: aiming for a moderation in greenhouse gas emissions and anticipating the impacts of expected climate trends. Thus climate affects all aspects of sustainable development by exacerbating other stressors (such as population increase or aquifer depletion) and creating new ones (such as sea level rise). Responsible and pro-active planning requires better quantification of the expected climate impacts but has to go further as all sectors of society are affected. Thus there is a need to develop and evaluate mitigation and adaptation strategies, and improve the dissemination of information to enable managing climate risks, policy concerns, and social and political science.

To meet this challenge, The Earth Institute has formed the Columbia Climate Center, which seeks to integrate the many climate-related activities and research efforts at Columbia. The center integrates studies in the natural and physical sciences, engineering, socioeconomics and political science to improve humankind’s capacity to understand, predict, and respond to climate variability and change. The main goals of the Columbia Climate Center are to:
coordinate climate science research at Columbia University to share information and promote synergy between the climate groups
delineate mitigation and adaptation options so societies can respond proactively to anticipated impacts of climate change and variability, and
develop a framework at Columbia University to provide policy analysis and advice to stakeholders and policymakers.

The Columbia Climate Center takes a multi-disciplinary approach involving climate scientists, engineers, economists, experts in public health, and social and political scientists. It brings together the research carried out throughout the university, especially at its participating units:

Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory (LDEO)
NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS)
International Research Institute for Climate and Society (IRI)
Cooperative Institute for Climate Applications and Research (CICAR)
Center for Environmental Research and Conservation (CERC)
Center for Climate Systems Research (CSSR)
Center for Research on Environmental Decisions (CRED)
Global Roundtable on Climate Change (GROCC)
Lenfest Center for Sustainable Energy (LCSE)
Center for Hazards and Risk Research (CHRR)
The educational programs of The Environmental Law Clinic
The twelve-month Masters Program in Climate and Society

The work of the climate community at Columbia is illustrated by four examples taken from climate science, technology, policy and decision-making science to highlight how climate research spans multiple disciplines. Understanding climate dynamics requires including human modifications of the land surface, technological developments that can lead to reductions of carbon emissions, present engineering challenges as well as deployment and policy challenges, stakeholders from the business world, governments, and non governmental organizations have taken a stand on the need for action to reduce carbon emissions, and finally that cutting edge research in psychology shows how climate information can best be conveyed to users by incorporating experience based information in addition to scientific description.

Land Use Practice and Climate Change
This example of research in climate science from scientists at LDEO and GISS (Cook, Miller and Seager, submitted to GRL) illustrates the interaction of land use practices and the climate system by examining the role of dust blown into the atmosphere from eroded farmland and the intensity and location of the drought during the Dust Bowl of the 1930s. Model simulations indicate that the drought was triggered by disruption of precipitation patterns due to abnormal ocean temperatures in the Pacific.

However, poor land practices led to erosion and dust storms. The presence of dust in the atmosphere pushed the drought further north, leading to further potential for erosion. By examining the interrelationship of climate factors in the past and the accompanying health and social impacts, we can gain improved understanding of how future climate variability and change will occur. The suite of IPCC models anticipate that the western United States will have decreased rainfall compared to the second half of the twentieth century.

View project description

Zero Carbon Emission Power Plants
From a technological standpoint we highlight the research aiming toward the design of zero emission power plants by capturing carbon dioxide. Graduate researchers supported by the Lenfest Center for Sustainable Energy are developing a technology road map that integrates oxy-fuel combustion concepts with gasification, high temperature oxygen separation membranes, advanced turbines, fuel cells and advanced combustion in pressurized fluidized beds.

This work includes research in collaboration with the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences on clean coal technology in China, the world’s leader in coal use. Another project builds upon the technology proposed by the Zero Emission Coal Alliance (ZECA) that involves hydrogasification of coal, production of hydrogen, and carbonation of lime with CO2 as means of utilizing coal as an energy source without polluting the environment. Hydrogen is then used to produce electricity via high-temperature fuel cells and lime is regenerated to produce a pure concentrated stream of carbon dioxide for sequestration. This research is led by Professors Marco Castaldi, Tuncel Yegulalp, and others.

Top

Global Roundtable on Climate Change
The Path to Climate Sustainability, A Joint Statement made by the Global Roundtable on Climate Change in 2007 describes a pathway for climate change policy. The joint statement highlights the urgency for global action to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide. This statement was released on February 20, 2007 and has been endorsed by 108 companies from around the word and by 138 individual leaders from business, civil society, government and research institutions. While highlighting the importance of increased efficiency they also note the need to use non-fossil-fuel energy sources and to deploy technologies to capture and store carbon dioxide.

The statement highlights why success is possible and how success may be reached. The signatories call for concerted action of governments, the private sector, trade unions, and other sectors of civil society. There is a strong emphasis on the global scope of the problem, such that all countries must be party to the accord, with commitments to action reflecting the levels of economic development.

Communicating Risks Associated with Climate Change
Effective communication of climate risks and opportunities is a key element in proactive adaptation and garnering support for mitigation efforts. Research by Center for Research on Environmental Decisions (CRED) researchers (Marx, Weber, Orlove, Leiserowitz, Krantz, Roncoli and Phillips, 2007) indicate that current strategies of communication are not ideally designed. Most climate forecast communications assume people process information analytically, and are most frequently presented as probabilistic. However, it is commonly found that users either fail to act or overreact. For both individuals and groups, experience has greater impact than scientific description (for example, probabilistic) on decision-making.

The emotional charge associated with experience, even vicariously, the ease of remembering specific experiences, and how recently they occurred all affect perceptions of likelihood. Individuals suffer from both a finite pool of worry (in that for example increasing concern over the environment tends to decrease concern over political stability even if the latter has not improved) and the single action bias (whereby people tend to explore one measure and no more) which also contribute to inadequate responses to climate information.

However when probabilistic information is presented in relation to current or recent conditions, or can be translated into concrete images, strong emotions, or stories, the decision-maker can understand it as, or relate it to, experience. Furthermore, sharing vicarious experience in group discussions also has this effect. Both group discussion and translation of forecasts into concrete examples improve the intuitive grasp of the probabilistic outcomes and also leads to larger number of potential adaptive responses.
View project description