Global Environmental Change Research Pathways for the Next Decade, Overview (1998) / Chapter Skim
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OVERVIEW Global Environmental Change: Research Pathways for the Next Decade
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and those of its collaborating bodies, the Committee reaffirms the achievements and significance of the USGCRP while finding that the Program must now be revitalized, focusing its use offends more effectively on the principal unanswered scientific questions about global environmental change. This goal demands thatfunding and efforts be directed toward a coherent and coordinated suite of research activities and supporting observational, data management, and modeling capabilities, all aimed at imperative research objectives and clearly defined scientific questions.
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In 1990, Congress established the USGCRP to carry out an organized, coherent attack on the scientific issues posed by global environmental change. The USGCRP had its principal roots in the 1980s, as both scientists and the public became increasingly aware of the links among human activities, current and future states of the global environment, and human welfare.
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The shaping of such comprehensive endeavors, which arose by recognizing the importance of chemical and biological as well as physical factors in the global system, also led to the establishment of the International Geosphere-Biosphere Program of the International Council of Scientific Unions. The priorities and nature of this program, from a US perspective, were laid out in a sequence of NRC reports.5 Most recently, human components in global environmental change have been given wider recognition in the creation of the International Human Dimensions Program on Global Environmental Change.
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Scientific Roots of Global Climate Research The intellectual crucible in which the USGCRP was formed, however, was itself forged far earlier. The possibility of global changes in the biological, physical, and chemical environment had been recognized in the 19th century and became a widely accepted idea by the beginning of the 20th century.
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Still other studies addressed a widening range of potential global change impacts and their policy implications.~5 In 1979 and 1989, major World Climate Conferencesi6 were convened by the World Meteorological Organization and other international bodies. International meetingsi7 converged on the conclusion that the implications of changing climate should be assessed for development policy.
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Eventually, an international assessment was conducted under the auspices of the World Meteorological Organization and other international bodies.22 The discovery of Rowland and Molinaa reminds us that studies and reports often do not adequately address the complexities of the real world. Indeed, they can even significantly miss the mark.
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An additional critical point to make in this context is that many issues in global environmental change, such as climate change, are far more complex than even the difficult ozone story. The chemical, physical, and biological aspects of the greenhouse problem are extraordinarily daunting to study, and yet an additional, more difficult challenge probably lies in understanding the human dimensions of global change phenomena.
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The discussion of each of the six primary topical areas is structured in terms of Research Imperatives central issues posed to the corresponding scientific community by the challenge of global environmental change (see Appendix C)
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If surprises are in the wind, we hope that this broadly spreading canopy of topics, Research Imperatives, and Scientific Questions will catch the signal. The Scientific Questions are posed at a level of detail from which an observational program, space-based and in situ, can be defined, refined, and realized.
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The central purposes of the USGCRP areas follow: · To observe and document changes in the Earth system · To understand why these changes are occurring · To improve predictions of future global changes · To analyze the environmental, socioeconomic, and health consequences of global change · To support state-of-the-science assessments of global environmental change issues.26 These "central purposes" of the USGCRP set a clear, appropriate, overarching vision for the Program. Moreover, during the past decade, the USGCRP has realized an impressive array of scientific accomplishments.
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They also set a formidable and difficult agenda for science, and this conclusion carries with it the need to do better. We must find ways of advancing the scientific attack on the problems of global environmental change more effectively.
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Nevertheless, the space missions designed to facilitate global change research, such as sea surface altimetry and scatterometry and the Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite, have been great successes. Moreover, after an 11-year hiatus, the capability to obtain ocean-color data has recently been restored with great scientific reward.
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This foundation will be central for needed future missions, and it will set the baseline for a long-term, operational environmental monitoring program that must be built on the operational weather and ozone-observing system of NOAA, the US Department of Defense (DOD) , and their international partners.
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. Need to Maintain Critical Observations During the past 10 years, the value of critical combinations of models and observations has been repeatedly demonstrated in providing the nation and the world with critical information about specific issues of global environmental change.
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These are precisely the types of problems that the USGCRP was charged to resolve. Needfor Well-Calibrated Observations During the past 10 years, we have been reminded again and again of the painful consequences of attempting to use inadequately calibrated observations to answer important questions about global environmental change.
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Strategic decisions on scientific goals, research programs, and supporting infrastructure are critical elements of this leadership, and it is the Committee's view that a new strategic approach is needed. We thus present our findings and recommendations with the full sense of responsibility that accompanies the strong belief that the challenges posed to people by global environmental change will not go away.
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For each field, the Committee discusses the character of the scientific problems; presents case studies associated with specific, relevant transitions in our scientific understanding of the Earth system; defines the primary unanswered Scientific Questions; critically reviews lessons learned in the course of achieving scientific transitions; and extracts from the analysis a set of Research Imperatives that, together with the corresponding, critical, unanswered Scientific Questions address fundamental needs to know in health, public policy, economics, international relations, and national leadership. Observational priorities flow from the identified Research Imperatives and Scientific Questions, as do the required data and information systems required to manage these observations as well as some of the fundamental modeling issues that must be addressed to link the observations with the questions.
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Finding 1.2c: Within Changes in the Climate System on Decadal to Century Timescales, the following central scientific issues must be confronted: · Understand patterns in the climate system. Natural Climate: Improve knowledge of decadal to century-scale natural climate patterns, their distributions in time and space, their optimal characterization, mechanistic controls, feedbacks, and sensitivities, including their interactions with, and responses to, anthropogenic climate change.
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. Finding 1.2d: Within Changes in the Chemistry of the Atmosphere, the following central scientific issues must be confronted: · Define and predict secular trends in the intensity of ultraviolet exposure the Earth receives by documenting the concentrations and distributions of stratospheric ozone and the key chemical species that control its catalytic destruction and by elucidating the coupling between chemistry, dynamics, and radiation in the stratosphere and upper troposphere.
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Finding 1.2f: Within Human Dimensions of Global Environmental Change, the following central scientific issues must be confronted: · Understand the major human causes of changes in the global environment and how they vary over time, across space, and between economic sectors and social groups. · Determine the human consequences of global environmental change on key life-support systems, such as water, health, energy, natural ecosystems, and agriculture, and determine the impacts on economic and social systems.
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The emergence of the DIVERSITASg program demonstrates that it is beginning to be addressed better internationally. Crosscutting Themes Two common, linked themes emerge clearly from the identified Research Imperatives, Scientific Questions, and the associated observations (elaborated in Appendix C and described in the full report)
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Finding 2.1: Key crosscutting scientific themes that emerge from the total set of Research Imperatives and Scientific Questions must be addressed in an integrated fashion. Finding 2.2: .
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The USGCRP must develop an approach that satisfies a number of critical objectives: · Improves the ability to establish accurate time series of spatially resolved flux measurements of carbon species and their isotopes and associated observations of molecular oxygen · Clarifies the distribution and fates of water · Establishes the spatial and temporal distribution of the phases of water in the middle-upper troposphere · Defines climate change on temporal and spatial scales relevant to current and emerging issues of public policy · Provides the capability to resolve sharp nonlinearities within the Earth system that are triggered by chemical composition changes, which in turn lead to phase changes that markedly affect the transport of infrared radiation. A Coherent Observational Strategy The Research Imperatives help to identify preliminary emphases for required observations and data systems and to focus the needed calculations and models; the Scientific Questions provide the specificity required to establish what must be done to advance our understanding.
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Instrument or technology changes per se are not the problem; the problem is inadequate cross-calibration between instruments, and this inadequacy usually results from the absence of commitment to observational continuity. The Research Imperatives identified in this report express guiding considerations for the USGCRP to fulfill its responsibility for observing, documenting, and understanding global environmental change.
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Nevertheless, these less glamorous activities may yield much more useable information for the foreseeable future about the natural processes leading to environmental fluctuations on such timescales and hence about the modifications induced by human activities. A coherent observational strategy is needed that builds on the identified Research Imperatives and Scientific Questions and on available national and international space and in-situ networks.
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The situation for in-situ observations across the full global environmental change agenda is in far worse shape. Finding 3.2: The connectivity of NOAA's NPOESS program with NASA's Earth Observing System in Mission to Planet Earth is an important and not yet adequately resolved issue.
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The second component may require additional funds for NOAA; it may require modification of NOAA's mission (e.g., a strong commitment by NOAA to address global environmental change as part of its mission) , and it definitely requires significantly improved coordination between NOAA and NASA.
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This balance among the space-based, airborne, and ground-based observations does not reflect the spectrum of requirements that the Research Imperatives demand. Indeed, space-based observations and their associated data-management systems dominate the resources of the USGCRP, a trend that impinges on both the research and analysis support and the in-situ observational networks.
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This achievement demands specific choices, and it demands focused responsibility. The NRC Committee on Data Management and Computation has already shown that effective data systems require continuous and widespread involvement of the science team.
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Finding 5: Data systems must be agile and responsive to technology developments and to emerging techniques for data handling, analysis, and transfer. Data systems must also maintain scientific discipline and focused responsibility, so that the link between scientific question and clear scientific conclusion is not broken.
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Finding 6: The policy issues that confront global change research, like the Scientific Questions, are serious, particularly with regard to their impact on humans. These issues will rely on models of exceedingly complex behaviors over a significant range of scales in space and time.
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Consequently, there must be a greater commitment to advanced computing resources, as well as human resources, by the USGCRP to ensure that global modeling is achieved at spatial and temporal scales appropriate to the needs of the policy community and the private sector. As the USGCRP enters this second critical decade of its existence, the scientific challenges it faces are heightened by the need to understand and foreshadow the regional, as well as other, impacts of global environmental changes.
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, 1982c. Causes and Effects of Stratospheric Ozone Reduction: An Update.
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World Meteorological Organization, Geneva. World Meteorological Organization (WMO)
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