In 2002, the US government announced an initiative designed to unite the diverse programs that were involved in studying and planning for climate change under a single organization, the Climate Change Science Program (CCSP). The program includes staff from 13 different agencies with a cumulative annual budget of $1.7 billion; its goals are to strengthen our scientific understanding and help coordinate planning for mitigation and adaptation efforts. Four years into the CCSP, the National Academies of Science performed an evaluation of its progress; the resulting report was released yesterday.
The report evaluates the progress made towards CCSP goals, as well as its prospects for future successes. Its primary concern for the future focuses on the somewhat unwieldy structure of the program: its efforts are dependent upon budget allocations within 13 different agencies, any of which may have overlapping interests but diverging priorities. This plays out by making general progress in many areas dependent upon the funding decisions within a single agency. One of the examples the report cites is the fact that research programs in a number agencies all depend on NASA satellites, but none of these agencies have any say in the NASA budgeting process, so key observational programs have been scrapped.
Despite this awkward arrangement, the report highlights a large amount of scientific progress. It cites "improved understanding of many aspects of the climate and related environmental systems, including aerosol direct forcing, land use change, sea ice retreat, glacier melting, and atmospheric warming." That improved understanding appears to have reduced many remaining uncertainties regarding the climate over the past five years and has set the stage for improved climate models. The report suggests, however, that these improved models either are, or will shortly be, constrained by computer time; it describes the need to increase computing power available for climate modeling by 30-fold over the next five years in order to keep up with our expectations for progress.
The report also describes two related issues that represent the largest limitations of CCSP. So far, the improved knowledge and models haven't been used to start bringing the impact of climate change down to local levels. The report cites examples such as disease spread and water use dynamics where the local effects of climate change may be dramatic, but differ radically among different areas of the US. This leaves local and regional authorities in the dark about what to expect, and effectively eliminates the possibility of rational planning for mitigation and adaptation efforts.
Even if/when there is valuable information to convey, the CCSP appears to be poorly prepared to do it. The group only has two staff dedicated to communications; the NAS suggests that this isn't even sufficient to maintain and update the CCSP website. As a result, prior outreach efforts to NGOs and state and local officials have happened on an ad hoc basis, and have been extremely limited. The report concludes, "Discovery science and understanding of the climate system are proceeding well, but use of that knowledge to support decision making and to manage risks and opportunities of climate change is proceeding slowly."
In my view, the combination of the weakness of the communications efforts and failure to examine local impacts have probably had a significant impact on many aspects of the public's inertia regarding climate change. It's easy to ignore the issue when the consequences remain abstract. It's only reasonable that people should be given a greater sense of what the practical and financial impacts will be in their back yard before they're asked to engage in things like energy conservation efforts.