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Regional climate offices and regional assessment reports needed

Nature Geoscience volume 1, page 78 (2008)Cite this article

To the Editor

The commentary by Visbeck in the January 2008 issue of Nature Geoscience discusses the need to buttress the IPCC knowledge base by including regional activities. Even in the case of a successful climate policy with significant reductions of CO2 emissions, knowledge about regional and local manifestations of anthropogenic climate changes are needed for appropriate adaptation measures. We propose that the problem has three additional noteworthy components:

  • The stakeholders, including the media and the public at large, interpret the science in their cultural framework. Scientific knowledge undergoes many transformations before entering the public sphere. Vested interests, political as well as economical, play a role in this transformation. To fully comprehend this transformation social and cultural sciences are needed.

  • Comprehensive analyses of the regional and local climate, as well as climate impacts, are not the only requirement. In addition, basic concepts — such as natural climate variability, detection of human-induced change and attribution to causes, scenarios and uncertainty — need to be explained to the public.

  • Only to a limited extent do scientists understand the concerns among stakeholders and the public at large. Some of these concerns are not rational, some are even outlandish, but because they prevail in the social arena they influence the political decision process. Science needs to be aware of the full spectrum of issues that the public is concerned about.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute for Coastal Research, GKSS Research Center, Max-Planck Str. 1, Geesthacht, 21502, Germany

    Hans von Storch & Insa Meincke

  2. KlimaCampus, Bundesstrasse 53, Hamburg, 20146, Germany

    Hans von Storch

Authors
  1. Hans von Storch
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  2. Insa Meincke
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von Storch, H., Meincke, I. Regional climate offices and regional assessment reports needed. Nature Geosci 1, 78 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1038/ngeo111

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