Warming Plateau?
Climatologists Face Inconvenient Truth | Der Spiegel - Sept. 23, 2013 |

Data shows global temperatures aren't rising the way climate scientists have predicted. Now the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change faces a problem: publicize these findings and encourage skeptics -- or hush up the figures.

Science vs. Climate Politics

Germany's Federal Ministry of Research would prefer to leave any discussion of the global warming hiatus entirely out of the new IPCC report summary. "In climate research, changes don't count until they've been observed on a timescale of 30 years," claims one delegate participating in the negotiations on behalf of German Research Minister Johanna Wanka of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU). The Ministry for the Environment's identical stance: "Climate fluctuations that don't last very long are not scientifically relevant."

At most, German delegates at the conference would be willing to include an admission that "the pace of temperature change has slowed" -- a reinterpretation that doesn't correspond to the latest research findings.

Germany's highest-ranking climate researcher, physicist Jochem Marotzke, director of the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology, in Hamburg, is fighting back against this refusal to face facts. Marotzke, who is also president of the German Climate Consortium and Germany's top scientific representative in Stockholm, promises, "We will address this subject head-on." The IPCC, he says, must engage in discussion about the standstill in temperature rise.

Marotzke calls the claim that a temperature plateau isn't significant until it has lasted for over 30 years unscientific. "Thirty years is an arbitrarily selected number," he says. "Some climate phenomena occur on a shorter timescale, some on a longer one." Climate researchers, Marotzke adds, have an obligation not to environmental policy but to the truth. "That obligates us to clearly state the uncertainties in our predictions as well," he says.

Can Abenomics Cope With Environmental Disaster?

アベノミックスは環境災害 395;対応できるか

An important and little noted component of Abenomics, Japan's information and communications technology (ICT) growth strategy propounded on June 14 2013, ostensibly aims at the evolution of a new model of efficient, resilient and green urban and rural infrastructures. General Electric's leadership in applying ICT, or the "Industrial Internet," to its power systems shows that what you can monitor, you can manage, and that it is possible to realize significant efficiencies as well as innovate other capacities such as predictivity. Together with domestic businesses, Japan's central agencies, big local governments, and the Abe regime's regulatory and fiscal initiatives have been working to deploy cutting-edge innovation in a swath of smart city initiatives as well as special zones. Although some observers deride these initiatives as comparable to failed technopolis policies of the 1980s, Japan's initiatives may help us address the very real 21st century challenges of expensive energy, climate change, and the sobering "death" of stationarity (wherein past hydrologic and other data can no longer be used to predict the future). This latter is of deep concern to planners of water, power and other crucial infrastructures, which represent trillions of dollars of investment annually. The issues take on added urgency in light of climate denial whose effect has been to conceal the scale of the crisis from the academic community and attentive public. The loss of stationarity means we are essentially in uncharted waters concerning the stressors that our water, power, transportation, and other urban infrastructures need to be resilient against now and over time. The question is whether Abenomics can deal with the death of stationarity and help answer our urgent collective need for sustainability.

Climate Change

Global awareness of climate change risks has not kept pace with the science. This awareness deficit was seen in the run-up to, and aftermath of, the September 27 2013 release of the International Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC) Fifth Assessment Report's first installment and summary. The release was preceded by a sadly effective "denialist" media campaign that positioned the IPCC report as alarmist while also claiming that it showed the previous decade and a half had seen a "pause" in climate change. Indeed, a Der Spiegel poll released September 23, 2013 suggested that even the "Germans are losing their fear of climate change," with those expressing fear dropping from 62% in 2006 to 39% in 2013. This disinformation campaign continued after the report's release.

The Der Spiegel poll seems a striking indicator of what might described as an "Alice in Wonderland" era, wherein as august a publication as The New York Times closed its environmental desk at the very moment that scientific evidence of the climate crisis mounted. The global public debate's incredible disconnect with reality is dispiriting. But this unpleasant fact cannot be ignored here because it influences a wide range of funding and other decisions relevant to Humanities Assistance and Disaster Relief (HADR). As we shall see, it even shapes many of the HADR agents' understanding of how dire are our collective challenges.

Because of the widely held belief that climate change is only a catastrophe for coming generations (in itself, a morally odious complacency), let us review solid evidence that climate change is very much a present and rapidly worsening peril.

Scientific Consensus: Earth's Climate Is Warming | NASA |