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Whilst mitigation has dominated policy and research agendas in recent years there is an increasing recognition that communities also need to be preparing for change that is unavoidable, partially a consequence of anthropogenic greenhouse gases already emitted to the atmosphere. The perceived need for adaptation has also received additional impetus through the high public profile now given to the impacts of current day weather variability, particularly the significant economic and social costs associated with recent extreme events. However, being a relatively new focus for both research and policy communities; practical evidence of the extent, feasibility, efficiency, and cost effectiveness of potential adaptation options remains largely lacking. In response, this paper seeks to make a contribution to this embryonic but evolving knowledge base by considering the theoretical underpinnings of adaptation and ultimately how this translates into practice 'in the real world'. The analytical commentary, based on a bottom-up approach involving iterative engagement with key stakeholders and experts, reflects on the identification of measures that are either innovative or examples of good practice in reducing or transferring climate risks, as well as considering those 'enabling' institutional structures and processes that act to support implementation on the ground. The paper concludes by synthesising the key findings to date in order to highlight some of the opportunities for, and barriers to, adaptation activity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Climate change is a major issue for all levels of government, global, national and local. Local authorities' responses to climate change have tended to concentrate on their role in reducing greenhouse gases. However, the scientific consensus is that we also need to adapt to unavoidable climate change. Spatial planning at a local level has a critical anticipatory role to play in promoting robust adaptation. This paper reviews the shift in local authorities' planning policies for climate change adaptation in the UK since 2000, and provides evidence of underlying attitudes amongst planning professionals to climate change. It shows that, while the issue of climate change is becoming recognized with respect to flood risk, the wider implications (for instance, for biodiversity and water resources) are not yet integrated into plans. The reasons for this lie in lack of political support and lack of engagement of the planning profession with climate change networks. But the paper also argues there are difficulties in acknowledging the need for adaptation at the local level, with the short-term horizons of local plans at odds with perceptions of the long-term implications of climate change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper starts by assessing the extent to which gender considerations have been taken into account in the international processes concerning the development of climate change policy. Finding that there has been very little attention to gender issues, neither in the protocols and treaties nor in the debates around them, the paper goes on to consider whether there are in fact any meaningful gender considerations as regards (a) emissions of greenhouse gases, (b) vulnerability to climate change, and (c) participation in projects under climate funding. It concludes by suggesting some areas where attention to gender could improve the effectiveness of climate interventions and also benefit women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The climate observations at Orcadas represent the only southern high-latitude site where data span more than a century, and its daily measurements are presented for the first time in this paper. Although limited to a single station, the observed warming trends are among the largest found anywhere on the earth, facilitating the study of changes in extreme temperatures as well as averages. Factors that may influence Antarctic climate include natural variability; changes in greenhouse gases; and, since about the mid-1970s, the development of the ozone hole. The seasonality of observed warming and its temporal evolution during the century are both key for interpretations of Antarctic climate change. No statistically significant climate trends are observed at Orcadas from 1903 to 1950. However, statistically significant warming is evident at Orcadas throughout all four seasons of the year since 1950. Particularly in austral fall and winter, the warming of the cold extremes (coldest 5% and 10% of days) substantially exceeds the warming of the mean or of the warmest days, providing a key indicator for cold season Antarctic climate change studies. Trends in the summer season means and extremes since 1970 are approximately twice as large as those observed earlier, supporting suggestions of additional regional warming in that season because of the effects of ozone depletion on the circulation. Further, in the spring and summer seasons, significant mean warming also occurred prior to the development of the Antarctic ozone hole (i.e., 1950–70), supporting an important role for processes other than ozone depletion, such as greenhouse gas increases, for the climate changes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The central focus of this paper is the disjunction between the findings of climate science in revealing the threat of global warming and the failure to act appropriately to these warnings. The development of climate science can be illuminated through the perspective provided by Peircian semiotics, but efforts to account for its success as a science and its failure to convince people to act accordingly indicate the need to supplement Peirce's ideas. The more significant gaps, it is argued, call for the integration of major new ideas. It will be argued that Peirce should be viewed as a Schellingian philosopher, and it will then be shown how this facilitates integration into his philosophy of concepts developed by other philosophers and theorists within this tradition. In particular, Bourdieu's concepts of the 'habitus' and 'field' will be integrated with Peirce's semiotics and used to analyse the achievements and failures of climate science. It will be suggested that the resulting synthesis can augment Peirce's evolutionary cosmology and so provide a better basis for comprehending and responding to the situation within which we find ourselves. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Without the participation of the United States, for many years the world's largest emitter of greenhouse gases, mitigation of global climate change seems hardly conceivable. Despite the US rejection of the Kyoto Protocol and the reluctance of the Bush administration to engage in post-Kyoto negotiations, recent developments suggest that the US position towards climate policy might change in the medium run. This study provides an overview on current trends in US climate policy. We outline the main elements of national climate policy proposals and state-level initiatives. Based on this overview, recent trends in US climate policy are related to the European approach to combat climate change. Furthermore, we elaborate on the aspects that may be important for Europe to design its own domestic and international climate policy in order to achieve the long-term global goal of stabilizing greenhouse gas concentrations. While it seems likely that the US will take a leading role in international climate policy, it can also be expected to challenge the European position in many respects rather than to simply support any Kyoto-type process. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A new climate model (ECHAM5/MPI-OM1) developed for the fourth assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) at Max-Planck Institute for Meteorology is used to study the climate changes under the different increased CO2 scenarios (B1, A1B and A2). Based on the corresponding model results, the sea surface temperature and salinity structure, the variations of the thermohaline circulation (THC) and the changes of sea ice in the northern hemisphere are analyzed. It is concluded that from the year of 2000 to 2100, under the B1, A1B and A2 scenarios, the global mean sea surface temperatures (SST) would increase by 2.5°C, 3.5°C and 4.0°C respectively, especially in the region of the Arctic, the increase of SST would be even above 10.0°C; the maximal negative value of the variation of the fresh water flux is located in the sub-tropical oceans, while the precipitation in the eastern tropical Pacific increases. The strength of THC decreases under the B1, A1B and A2 scenarios, and the reductions would be about 20%, 25% and 25.1% of the present THC strength respectively. In the northern hemisphere, the area of the sea ice cover would decrease by about 50% under the A1B scenario. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ability of coupled GCMs to correctly simulate the climatology and a prominent mode of variability of the West African monsoon is evaluated, and the results are used to make informed decisions about which models may be producing more reliable projections of future climate in this region. The integrations were made available by the Program for Climate Model Diagnosis and Intercomparison for the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The evaluation emphasizes the circulation characteristics that support the precipitation climatology, and the physical processes of a “rainfall dipole” variability mode that is often associated with dry conditions in the Sahel when SSTs in the Gulf of Guinea are anomalously warm. Based on the quality of their twentieth-century simulations over West Africa in summer, three GCMs are chosen for analysis of the twenty-first century integrations under various assumptions about future greenhouse gas increases. Each of these models behaves differently in the twenty-first-century simulations. One model simulates severe drying across the Sahel in the later part of the twenty-first century, while another projects quite wet conditions throughout the twenty-first century. In the third model, warming in the Gulf of Guinea leads to more modest drying in the Sahel due to a doubling of the number of anomalously dry years by the end of the century. An evaluation of the physical processes that cause these climate changes, in the context of the understanding about how the system works in the twentieth century, suggests that the third model provides the most reasonable projection of the twenty-first-century climate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The range of possibilities for future climate evolution needs to be taken into account when planning climate change mitigation and adaptation strategies. This requires ensembles of multi-decadal simulations to assess both chaotic climate variability and model response uncertainty. Statistical estimates of model response uncertainty, based on observations of recent climate change, admit climate sensitivities-defined as the equilibrium response of global mean temperature to doubling levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide-substantially greater than 5?K. But such strong responses are not used in ranges for future climate change because they have not been seen in general circulation models. Here we present results from the‘climateprediction.net’experiment, the first multi-thousand-member grand ensemble of simulations using a general circulation model and thereby explicitly resolving regional details. We find model versions as realistic as other state-of-the-art climate models but with climate sensitivities ranging from less than 2?K to more than 11?K. Models with such extreme sensitivities are critical for the study of the full range of possible responses of the climate system to rising greenhouse gas levels, and for assessing the risks associated with specific targets for stabilizing these levels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The global climate is subject to increasing change, and this has become more evident over recent years. The latest climate projection models of the United Nations Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change, a high-level, independent, scientific advisory body, suggest that if no action is taken now to reduce greenhouse gases, air surface temperatures could rise to levels that will significantly alter ecosystems. No one will be immune from the overall impacts of climate change, but it will have a disproportionate effect on the lives of poor people in developing countries, where poverty increases people's vulnerability to its harmful effects. Poor people in overcrowded temporary settlements erected on unsuitable land will be at risk of flooding and land slides. Those eking out an existence from subsistence farming will have no savings or assets to insure them against external shocks. Lack of sanitation and limited access to clean water, poor diet, and inadequate healthcare provision will undermine resistance to disease.

We analyze ensembles (four realizations) of historical and future climate transient experiments carried out with the coupled atmosphere-ocean general circulation model (AOGCM) of the Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research, version HADCM2, with four scenarios of greenhouse gas (GHG) and sulfate forcing. The analysis focuses on the regional scale, and in particular on 21 regions covering all land areas in the World (except Antarctica). We examine seasonally averaged surface air temperature and precipitation for the historical period of 1961–1990 and the future climate period of 2046–2075. Compared to previous AOGCM simulations, the HADCM2 model shows a good performance in reproducing observed regional averages of summer and winter temperature and precipitation. The model, however, does not reproduce well observed interannual variability. We find that the uncertainty in regional climate change predictions associated with the spread of different realizations in an ensemble (i.e. the uncertainty related to the internal model variability) is relatively low for all scenarios and regions. In particular, this uncertainty is lower than the uncertainty due to inter-scenario variability and (by comparison with previous regional analyses of AOGCMs) with inter-model variability. The climate biases and sensitivities found for different realizations of the same ensemble were similar to the corresponding ensemble averages and the averages associated with individual realizations of the same ensemble did not differ from each other at the 5% confidence level in the vast majority of cases. These results indicate that a relatively small number of realizations (3 or 4) is sufficient to characterize an AOGCM transient climate change prediction at the regional scale. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides a non-technical introduction to the economics of climate change. What is the greenhouse effect? It is the process by which radiatively active gases like carbon dioxide selectively absorb radiation at different points of the spectrum and thereby warm the surface of the earth. The greenhouse gases are transparent to incoming solar radiation but absorb significant amounts of outgoing radiation. There is no debate about the importance of the greenhouse effect, without which the Earth's climate would resemble the moon's. In thinking about the impact of climate change, one must recognize that the variable discussed on in most analyses--globally averaged surface temperature-- has little salience for impacts. Rather, variables that accompany or are the result of temperature changes--precipitation, water levels, extremes of droughts or freezes, and thresholds like the freezing point or the level of dikes and levees--will drive the socioeconomic impacts.

This article provides a sketch of some of the uncertainties and research questions associated with the issue of global climate change. Greenhouse gases in the atmosphere warm the Earth by reducing the radiation of heat into space, thus increasing the net inflow of radiative energy (radiative forcing). The most important of these gases by far is water vapor, which is not appreciably affected directly by human activity. The relations between changes in the atmosphere and changes in the global climate are extraordinarily complex, in large part because of a variety of important and poorly understood feedback processes--particularly those involving clouds and oceans. Despite a great deal of international debate and negotiation in recent years and the adoption of taxes aimed at carbon dioxide emissions in some European countries, the best characterization of the mean global policy toward climate change is: "Wait and see what we learn." Evaluation of this and alternative policies must confront serious economic problems and uncertainties.