When Climate Science Clashes with Real-World Policy

David Behar, leader of the San Francisco utility department’s climate program, couldn't get what he needed from a 2012 National Research Council report dealing with West Coast sea level rise projections.  A National Climate Assessment paper dealing with sea level rise didn’t seem to have what he needed, either.  Even after reviewing two California government reports dealing with sea level rise, Behar says he had to telephone climate scientists and review a journal paper summarizing the views of 90 experts before he felt confident that he understood science’s latest projections for hazards posed by the onslaught of rising seas.

“You sometimes have to interview the authors of these reports to actually understand what they’re saying,” Behar said.  “On the surface,” the assessments and reports that Behar turned to “all look like they’re saying different things,” he said.  “But when you dive deeper — with the help of the authors, in most cases — they don’t disagree with one another very much.”
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Behar isn’t the only one who’s frustrated.  An international chorus of scientists has long been warning the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that its approach to describing sea level rise risks is unhelpful for coastal planners.  The chorus of scientific dissent reached a crescendo recently when an opinion piece critical of the IPCC on sea level rise, written by six scientists, from Germany, England and China, was published by Nature Climate Change.  “We need to reorganize the whole structure of the IPCC reports toward something that’s more solution oriented,” said Jochen Hinkel, a senior researcher at the Global Climate Forum in Germany, and one of the authors of the op-ed.
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Behar is also co-chairing a federal climate change and natural resource science advisory committee that has drafted a report for the U.S. Interior Department.  The report will argue that local decision-makers need more “actionable science” to be produced.

The committee will say actionable science would “ideally” be “co-produced by scientists and decision makers,” providing data, analyses, projections and tools.  That would help officials make decisions about managing climate change’s risks and impacts by providing “rigorous and accessible” information.

That might involve policy makers and scientists spending more time in the same rooms.

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