From The President / Mots du président

.... from the President's Desk

Friends and colleagues:

I am writing this in the early days of January. I take this opportunity to wish all CMOS members a happy and healthy new year, and to remind you to renew your membership if you have not already done so. To those readers who are not members I encourage you to consider becoming a member of CMOS. New and continuing members alike, please consider making a donation. CMOS is a registered charity and able to issue receipts for donations made to the Society. The donations page on the CMOS web site (www.cmos.ca/donationse) provides information on ways to make charitable donations to CMOS. The coming year will be an eventful one for CMOS. The 46th CMOS Congress will take place from May 29th to June 1st 2012 in Montréal, jointly with the 21st AMS Conference on Numerical Weather Prediction and the 25th AMS Conference on Weather Analysis and Forecasting. This promises to be another outstanding Congress where exciting and important leading Canadian work in meteorology and oceanography and related topics will be presented. Please visit the Congress Web site (www.cmos.ca/congress2012/index.htm) to see important dates and get information about the Congress. Some of these critical dates, such as the deadline for submission of abstracts, are rapidly approaching. Please plan to attend and encourage the participation of your colleagues and students. Also, encourage your students to apply for a scholarship and consider nominating a colleague and a student for a CMOS prize or award. CMOS members will have received information sheets for prizes and awards with the December issue of the Bulletin and for scholarships with the current issue. This information can also be found posted on the CMOS web site.

Some of the readers of this column may have followed the Canadian and international media coverage of the recent United Nations Climate Change Conference in Durban (COP 17) and the subsequent announcement by Peter Kent, Minister of the Environment, of Canada's withdrawal from the Kyoto Protocol. These events motivated me to review the public statements and communications on the topic of climate change that CMOS has made over the past decade, and, in partnership with other societies, the letter to Members of Parliament in November, 2009 on the eve of the Copenhagen Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC). These statements and letter are posted on the CMOS web site and are publicly accessible from the home page. I encourage readers of this column to read them if they have not already done so. They assert the reality and increasing rapidity of climate change resulting from human activities. They stress the importance of understanding the science of climate change and variability to develop effective programs and policies on climate change, including addressing the commitments laid out in the Kyoto Protocol. They affirm the validity of the assessments undertaken by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The statements in 2003 and 2006 note that the Kyoto Protocol would, if fully implemented, slow the increase in the atmospheric concentration of Carbon dioxide but not halt it, and point to the need for further stronger actions later on to achieve that goal.

All of these statements and communications have relied on the understanding provided by the best available climate science. Advances in the scientific understanding of anthropogenic climate change over the past decade have reinforced the earlier conclusions and led to an improved understanding of how the times-scales of the climate system interact with those of the forcing agents, notably emissions of greenhouse gases, that are responsible for anthropogenic climate change. Canadian climate scientists have been at the forefront of this research. It has led to the recognition of the differing roles of the greenhouse gases with relatively short life-times in the atmosphere, and those with much longer life-times, notably carbon dioxide, in producing the warming associated with anthropogenic climate change. While curtailing the accumulation of the shorter-lived gases may limit the peak anthropogenic warming, the build-up of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will be responsible for warming effects that may last for centuries, producing effectively irreversible climate change. This understanding has more recently led to the development of new metrics involving cumulative carbon emissions to evaluate the long-term impact of greenhouse gas emissions and modeling methodologies for determining how net global emissions must evolve to effectively limit the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide.

The Copenhagen Accord sought to control greenhouse gas emissions sufficiently to limit global mean temperature increases to 2^oC to prevent dangerous effects of climate change from occurring. However, recent climate science results suggest that this threshold warming will likely be exceeded in the 21st century. Maintaining the 2^oC limit will require a rapid reduction and eventual cessation of net global carbon dioxide emissions over the next few decades followed by a net reduction of atmospheric carbon dioxide through the later decades of the 21st century. Such a reduction could not be achieved via the natural slow mechanisms by which atmospheric carbon dioxide is taken up over land surfaces and by the oceans. However, greenhouse gas emissions, including carbon dioxide, have continued at an increasing rate in the past decade with the result that the atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration is now higher than it has been over the past eight hundred thousand years of Earth history. The recently released IPCC Special Report on Managing the Risks of Extreme Events and Disasters to Advance Climate Change Adaptation concludes, among others things, that there is observational evidence that there have been changes in some extreme weather events since 1950 due to anthropogenic influences including increases in atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases. For example, it is likely that anthropogenic influences have led to warming of extreme daily minimum and maximum temperatures on the global scale.

The Durban Conference produced an agreement of the participants (including Canada) to enter into a treaty to address global warming, the terms of which are to be produced by 2015 with the treaty to become effective in 2020. The Kyoto Protocol is to continue in effect in the interim but without the commitment of some of the countries, including Canada, that are responsible for a large part of the accumulated emissions that have produced the rapid increase in carbon dioxide over the last century.

In light of the current understanding of anthropogenic climate change, the Canadian decision to withdraw from the Kyoto Protocol is a very sobering development. Although acceptance of the reality of anthropogenic climate change by the Canadian public has increased over the past decade, improved public understanding and awareness of its potentially harmful effects on human society and life on Earth is fundamental to implementing effective actions to address the human causes and long-term impacts of climate change. Consistent with its mandate to advance meteorology and oceanography in Canada, CMOS must continue to play a leading role in bringing about an improved public understanding of climate change. Our public communications are but one aspect of this role. Our tour speakers, supporting and encouraging educational outreach activities, and volunteer activities by CMOS members in Local Centres, are all very important contributions to public education. For their efforts and leadership, I thank the CMOS members who volunteer their time and energy to engage in these activities.

Norman McFarlane
CMOS President Président de la SCMO

(CMOS Bulletin SCMO February / février 2012)

I am writing this column a few days after returning from the Open Science Conference of the World Climate Research Programme. This was the first WCRP - wide conference to be held in over a decade. It was very large (over 1900 participants) but well organized with a strong focus on science. In contrast to the usual large scientific conferences that may include many sessions or symposia on different topics that in many cases are organized in a largely independent manner, this WCRP OSC was organized so as to bring together diverse research communities from around the world to present a comprehensive overview of climate research, identify overarching research challenges and facilitate strategic input into key scientific assessments. Perhaps more important, this OSC was held in the context of the, now widely accepted, understanding that human activities are now a dominant agent of climate change. The need for understanding and predicting of the evolution of climate system in its complexity and diversity is now critical for reducing vulnerability to high impact weather and climate events, and sustaining life.

The OSC highlighted many accomplishments as well as issues and challenges for the future in weather and climate science and applications. For example, great progress has been made in weather and climate modelling over the last half century. Models have increased in both complexity and accuracy and are now the main tool for predicting changes in the climate system that may result from human activities. However, much remains to be done. Although the dramatic increases in computing power that have occurred in the past half century have been a major factor in the progress of weather and climate modelling, there are remaining major challenges for climate modelling, such as those associated with the trade-off between accuracy (higher resolution and better representation of small scale features and processes in space and time) and complexity (modelling many components of the earth system in a coupled way, including biogeochemical interactions between ecosystems and the physical climate system, with widely different temporal and It has become increasingly clear that these modelling challenges can not be considered in isolation from each other and diverse approaches to dealing with them are needed and being explored more extensively than ever. For example, multi-component Earth-system models of intermediate complexity (EMICs), though simplified in their treatment of the component processes, have demonstrated their usefulness for addressing many key issues such as the implications of the nearly irreversible (on human time scales) impact of changes in atmospheric CO₂ on mitigation choices (plenary presentation by Susan Solomon).

The OSC also highlighted the importance and current threats to long-term high quality observations of weather and climate variables as a fundamental requirement for monitoring and understanding changes in climate. The Earth is now observed more completely and extensively than at any other time in human history. However, many of these observations suffer from inadequacies in quality and continuity that limit their usefulness for monitoring long-term changes in climate. Satellite observations have become a major part of the Earth observing system. However, critical gaps may emerge when the current earth observing satellites reach the end of their lifetimes. This concern was noted in talks presented at the OSC and is discussed in a recent informative Nature News report:

Key long-term quality controlled ground based measurements are also a critical component of the earth observing system that is needed to monitor climate change. These systems not only complement satellite measurements but are also critical for validating satellite measurements. Thus maintaining and enhancing groundbased measurements is of increasing importance in light of the uncertainties associated with future satellite measurements. (see the article on measurement of ozone profiles in the Bulletin on page 198).

One of the more sobering presentations during the OSC drew attention to the impact of the rapid increase in the population of the Earth in the last half century (presentation by Eugenia Kalnay, session B9). The population of the earth has recently (perhaps sometime during the OSC) surpassed the seven billion level and has more than doubled since 1950. Current reasonable projections of growth suggest that it will exceed nine billion by 2050. Although improvements in sanitation and disease control (the use of antibiotics) has been a major factor in this growth, the increased agricultural production that has been associated with the use of fossil fuels has also been a major factor. However, this rapid increase in human population is rapidly drawing down natural capital (grain production is flattening, urbanization and industrial farming practices are destroying forests and other ecosystems.) and is likely not sustainable. Thus the drivers of population growth are intimately connected with climate change as well. However, population growth has perhaps not hitherto received the attention it deserves in the climate science community.

For readers who are interested, many of the presentations at the WCRP OSC are on line at the conference web site:

Finally, but not least, I wish all CMOS members and readers of the Bulletin a joyous holiday season and a happy and healthy new year.

.............. from the President's Desk

.............. quelques mots du président