Issue No.11

Contents:
1. NEWS
A. HAMBURG CLIMATE-MODELLING CONFERENCE CONCLUDES
B. THE ECONOMICS OF PRESERVING THE GULF STREAM
C. REFORM AGENDA FOR WTO'S SEATTLE MINISTERIAL
D. UNEP AND IPCC GENERATE WARNINGS

2. THE CLIMATE CHALLENGE TO INFORMATION AND COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGY ICT
3. EDITORIAL OFFICE AND SUBSCRIPTION INFO.
4. CALENDAR

1. NEWS

Quote of the week: "A hundred years from now, people may well remember the 1990's not as the decade of the Internet's spread or the Dow's ascension but as the years when global temperatures began spiking upward," Bill McKibben, author of "The End of Nature," in New York Times, September 4, 1999.

A. HAMBURG CLIMATE-MODELLING CONFERENCE CONCLUDES
In mid-September the 4th International Conference on Modelling of Global Climate Change and Variability came to an end at the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg. Background to the topics of the conference was provided there in German, but follows here in English.

There have been two major successes in climate modelling over the past few years: One of them is the linking of atmospheric models with ocean models enabling seasonal predictions to be made 6-12 months in advance. An example of one such significant prediction is that made in 1997-98 for the strongest natural climate fluctuation, the El Niņo-Southern Oscillation (ENSO). The second major success is the improvements made in predicting anthropogenic climate change. Developing climate models has brought a better correlation between the models and observed long-range climate data such as that obtained from ice cores and tree rings. Further accuracy has been made possible by including the effects of major volcanic eruptions and stratospheric and tropospheric ozone. Climate change is already outside the range of natural variability.

Despite the successes, there is still a long way to go before climate predictions become as accurate as weather predictions. There are three areas in particular that have yielded successes, but deserve further work in climate modelling:
1. Modelling of the individual components of the climate system, the oceans, the atmosphere, and land masses has continued with better validation data and more computer power. Especially as regards the atmosphere, closer cooperation has been fruitful between numerical weather prediction and climate modelling.
2. The integration of the individual components has been facilitated not only by studying dynamic and thermodynamic processes, but also in the areas of atmospheric chemistry and biogeochemical cycles.
3. In the area of long-range climate variability, initial findings on decadic climate variability have revealed how predictions of fluctuations will be possible on this range in the future.

Numerical modelling is of central importance in international projects such as the World Climate Research Program (WCRP) and the International Geosphere Biosphere Programme (IGBP). In the CLIVAR (Climate Variability and Predictability) programme, one of the components of WCRP, model experiments and climate simulations play a leading role, opening the way for observation studies and field experiments. Rapidly developing techniques of data assimilation are improving both the modelling and the observation systems. Better modelling will help identify the extent of anthropogenic effects on the global climate.

Official, detailed day-by-day reports from the conference are available in English, http://www.mpimet.mpg.de/~mpi-conference/conference_reports.html

B. THE ECONOMICS OF PRESERVING THE GULF STREAM
How has climate change developed over the Nineties in politics, economics and the natural sciences? In both this issue of Computers and Climate and the next we shall look at an interdisciplinary trend perceptible in climate research in Germany especially. It combines findings from social with those from natural sciences into comprehensive "integrated models".

One of the former economic advisors of the Bush Administration, David Bradford from Princeton University, spoke in Germany recently. Since the days of his work under Bush, he said, he had come to recognize climate change as a greater threat. Furthermore he admitted having been influenced by his student Klaus Keller (http://www.princeton.edu/~klkeller), who is just finishing his dissertation, and collaborated on this article.

Keller and his coauthors revisited the calculations done by Yale's William D. Nordhaus about optimal climate policy. The calculations by Prof. Nordhaus caused great controversy in the early Nineties. For example, Nordhaus had calculated that a temperature increase of 3 degrees Centigrade would cause climate damages of 1.25 % of gross world product per annum. These low damages would justify only small reductions in future carbon dioxide emissions in a benefit-cost analysis.

Since the study of Nordhaus in 1994, much more detailed analyses of potentially damaging effects of climate change have become available. When Keller and his coauthors include, for example, the potential damages due to a changing Gulf Stream (a "thermohaline circulation collapse"), the total damages may rise up to 2.25 % GWP per annum. These damages would justify significantly larger reductions in future carbon dioxide emissions in a benefit-cost analysis. The new study has been submitted to the journal Climatic Change, and is discussed in the German newspaper Frankfurter Rundschau, http://www.frankfurter-rundschau.de/fr/211/211014.htm

There is a background summary on the Web showing how economists try to interpret climatologists' data for politicians, usually in the form of a cost/benefit comparison, "Global Climate Change Policy Options", http://www.puc.state.oh.us/consumer/gcc/policy.html. In that summary, Nordhaus is shown to play down the importance of future benefits by using a relatively high discount rate; "any discount rate that is chosen greatly reduces the benefits that economists would attribute to climate change policies (11).... Calculating the appropriate rate of discount ... depends on ethical concerns as well as empirical facts." Now, though, adding the risk of losing the Gulf Stream to the comparison as a possible future cost makes climate mitigation appear more important to future generations, even though benefits are discounted.

New data from ocean measurements in the North Atlantic and Arctic regions has contributed to such re-evaluations of earlier theories as Bradford and Keller undertook. Most recently, climatologist Andrew Kerr of Edinburgh University, who runs an Arctic ice programme for the Natural Environment Research Council, was quoted in the Financial Times on 15 September as saying that "Recent evidence from ship-based studies, coupled to the release of a vast military archive of information [from US and Russian submarines], shows unprecedented, extreme and systemwide changes taking place in the Arctic Ocean and surrounding seas during the 1990s."

See also the recent article in Global Change entitled "Slowdown Ahead for Atlantic Conveyor Belt?", http://www.globalchange.org/sciall/99fall4.htm

Preview
Germany's Potsdam Institute for Climate Change Research, http://www.pik-potsdam.de, is also doing a lot of work on the Gulf Stream. The next issue of Computers and Climate will feature a look at recent findings there and at three other climate research institutes in German-language countries.


C. REFORM AGENDA FOR WTO'S SEATTLE MINISTERIAL
The World Wide Fund for Nature International WWF has issued a position paper outlining WWF's proposals for "greening" the Seattle WTO trade liberalisation talks. The paper describes necessary reforms for ensuring that the multilateral trading system facilitates, rather than hinders, sustainable development. To view the position paper, see: http://www.panda.org (thanks to http://www.ictsd.org for this news item)

D. UNEP AND IPCC GENERATE WARNINGS
UNEP has updated its assessments from the version published in1997 with its new very general Global Environment Outlook 2000. The state of the environment 1998 has been characterized by the hottest year on record, with an increasing severity of forest fires and natural disasters such as El Nino's Southern Oscillation (ENSO). Policy responses are found to be moving in the right direction, but too slowly. Although multilateral environmental agreements MEAs are numerous, they are proving complex and need to be made more effective. A good overview is provided on UNEP's Website, http://www.unep.org/geo2000

Initial contributions notwithstanding, which have been leaked recently in Climate-L, the actual new book forthcoming from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change IPCC will not be published until March 2000. Then it will replace the IPCC's standard volumes entitled Climate Change 1995, published in 1996.

2. THE CLIMATE CHALLENGE TO INFORMATION AND COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGY ICT
Editorial piece
Whether on the whole information and communication technology ICT is beneficial or detrimental to climate change is a question subject to some controversy. First, though, in order to keep the arguments fair, the term ICT should be defined precisely. We invite readers to comment on how you view the matter. Consider first this fact, which is likely to be surprising to many of you.

The UNFCC and its Kyoto Protocol aim to combat climate change through such measures as increasing conversion efficiency by adding sensors and modern control equipment to boilers in power plants. If one includes such "information technology" in the argument, the results show a positive effect on climate change. Does the official OECD definition then reflect common usage of the term ICT, or is it an anomoly?

Let us hear from you.

DEFINITION FOR THE INFORMATION AND COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGY SECTOR, http://www.oecd.org//dsti/sti/it/stats/defin.htm, follows: " ...The proposed definition of ICT includes the following International Standard Industry Classifications (ISIC Rev.3) industries:
Manufacturing...
3313 Manufacture of industrial process control equipment"
"The proposed definition results from the on-going work of the ICCP Statistical Panel, in collaboration with Eurostat and the Eurostat Task Force on Information Society Statistics.
28 September 1998"