A few weeks ago, James Delingpole of the Telegraph wrote an article entitled "12 good reasons to scrap the Met Office". Since he's a much more productive writer than me, probably because he gets paid to do this, he's since written several other articles, and I should probably not be petty and move on. If it achieves nothing else though, this blog is at least a space for me to vent, so I'm not going to let it go. Instead I'm going to write circa 500 words on the topic in a light hearted manner. It's either that or I just type WRONG in size 72 font and be done with it.
Technically this isn't climate change, because the Met Office in the UK is chiefly responsible for predicting the weather. The confusion arises from the fact that it also hosts the Met Office Hadley Centre, which advises the Government and contributes to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and the National Climate Information Centre which just stores information collected from weather stations and the like. I don't really know why Mr Delingpole wants to ditch the weather forecasting arm and the Climate Information Centre, neither of which have issued any of the climate predictions he takes umbrage with. Maybe its because his headline point about us funding the Met Office with £200 million sounds more dramatic when you just pretend that all of that goes towards predicting climate change.
In 2007, an independent report was commissioned by the Public Weather Service Group to examine how well this whole predicting the weather lark was going. You can read the report here, but to summarize the key points they found that: the Met office saves hundreds of lives through flash flood predictions and the like, has an estimated worth to the public of £350 million (on a tax payer cost of £83 million) and produces "world class" output, endorsed by the multinational meteorology community. It's weather forecast accuracy is around 80%, which is something the report thought could be improved on in the future, helping to save even more lives and property. In short, the Public Weather Service is boss. It's the Bee's Knees, the Dog's Unmentionables and the Cat's Whiskers all rolled into one freakishly amazing animal. I am legitimately, massively, unashamedly, proud to say the UK has such an outstanding institution.
I would love to assume that nobody thinks that we should dump the day to day forecasting operations of the Met Office, but given this article in fox news back in 2011 asking if the US "really needed a National Weather Service", I felt I needed to type the above paragraph. I'm not going to bother disseminating that ridiculous piece of fox drivel by the way; this blog by Cliff Mass covered that if you're interested. Suffice to say that ditching your expertise and infrastructure steadily built to protect lives and inform citizens over many years is a fairly bad idea. Maybe to avoid this kind of nonsense, we should start every weather forecast with "Warning: You are about to receive information about the future that has been derived using only mathematics and the collected knowledge of mankind. This is really bloody difficult, so maybe give us some room for error."
To get back on topic, let us just assume that Mr. Delingpole wants to limit the Met Office to weather and shut down the Hadley Centre, because I can at least fit that viewpoint into the spectrum of sane opinions. What points does he make to support that idea? To come to the point, is the Hadley Centre a waste of tax payer money and a lying sham of an organization or not?
The article, if that's what you can call a collection of various quotes, claims to make 12 points to scrap the Met Office but really makes only two. 1) The Met Office global forecast has been too warm for the last 12 out of 13 years. 2) The seasonal forecasts are crap. Taking the second point first, seasonal forecasts have nothing to do with climate change models, so the argument that bad seasonal predictions mean the climate models don't work is entirely fatuous. After the whole "BBQ summer" debacle, in which the UK actually saw one of its wettest summers on record, the Met Office stopped announcing these kind of predictions in public. So that part has been scrapped, and you can stop moaning about it James. They were always on a hiding to nothing; you can use weather models to predict the next week or so, because they can simulate the dynamics currently in the atmosphere, or you can use the larger scale models to simulate general trends in the future; not specific predictions about precipitation over a few months. Trying to do a halfway stage and predict conditions in six months time is, as shown by the list of mishaps in the Delingpole article, something we haven't got right yet. This is hardly a reason to bin the whole operation though; it was an ambitious goal that didn't work out.
So how about the first point? Well, it is true that the Met Office usually over predict the yearly temperature. In 2012, they predicted a temperature anomaly of " between 0.34 °C and 0.62 °C, with a most likely value of 0.48 °C". The actual anomaly turned out to be 0.45 °C. That doesn't seem like a prediction we should be ditching. It seems like its working pretty well to me. It's a work in progress, and it does seem to have a bias toward over predicting, although there is also a suggestion that the measured anomaly is too low because of the distribution of stations. Nobody in the world is making perfect predictions. That is why they are called predictions, and not just "facts from the past". The Met Offices HADCM3 (in green here) in one of the best there is at predicting 1870-2010 temperatures.
Trying to pinpoint why this article bothered me so much, I think it may be the assumption that if the Met Office makes a mistake, it must be politically biased. It's over predicting temperatures on purpose, because it wants to cause panic to get more tax payer money. If that was true, surely over predicting by 0.03°C last year was a bit unambitious? If your going to inflate your model results, at least go for a whole tenth of a degree. Live dangerously. I guess the alternative might be that they have an excellent global climate model, which isn't quite perfect and over predicts a bit, but is still a lot better than lots of others. That doesn't make a very good headline though, I guess.
Sunday, June 30, 2013
Tuesday, June 04, 2013
Seeing Through The Clouds
Well, alright, not crap exactly. As I discussed in a previous post, 90's models have so far shown that they are doing a reasonable job of predicting temperature trends over the last 15 years. Plus, methods like hindcasts, which predict the last century so we can compare the result to observations, give us confidence. Unfortunately though, there are still a bunch of uncertainties we haven't quite cracked yet. Think of it as the resolution of a camera (if you want to, I'm not a fascist or anything, you can do whatever you want). An image taken from a distance might give you an idea of what's going on, but it's kind of blurry and the fine details aren't there. Get closer, or improve the resolution, and you can make out faces and the like. Currently we're in the blurry phase of climate modeling...we have an idea of what the future will be like, but the proverbial giraffe we're predicting might turn out to be a horse standing by a lamppost.
This was discussed recently, in slightly more scientific terms, by Stevens and Bony (2013) in a Science perspectives article. The article reads pretty much like an intervention for the climate community. Once the Intro is over, it gets on with step 1: admitting you have a problem. The figure below shows a group of four models from the CMIP5 project, the modelling study the next Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report will use. In each case, the discs show a world map after warming has reached 4 degrees warmer than the present. The top shows the variation in solar radiation due to clouds, while the bottom four show rainfall changes
So we are pretty certain it will be more rainy on the equator. Probably. And a change in cloud cover will increase the amount of solar radiation across the US and Europe. Or...it will be less. So clouds and rainfall are two of the things we basically aren't very good at predicting in the future. Not only the amount of change, but whether we'll see an increase or a decrease isn't yet obvious. It isn't just some of the physical parameters we don't understand either. Climate sensitivity is also a problem, the magic ratio that says "x amount of CO2 in the atmosphere leads to y amount of heating". You can alter that ratio in the model, leading to pretty drastically different results.
The recommendation of this paper is that the community as a whole goes "back to basics" and focuses on advancing understanding and improving the numerical representations of various processes, rather than the current trend of adding in other factors like soil moisture and the biosphere. I don't really know why the focus can't be on both areas at once, since it seems plain rude to ignore bits of the natural world. I guess the real take home from this is to not get overly cocky; the dream of those original scientists at the GFDL hasn't come true just yet.
Stevens, B., & Bony, S. (2013). What Are Climate Models Missing? Science, 340 (6136), 1053-1054 DOI: 10.1126/science.1237554
Monday, May 20, 2013
Dosage: one space mirror per year. Some side effects may occur.
Something small has gone wrong in your home. Maybe a light bulb has gone out, or the tap has started leaking at the hinge. You can't fix it right now, because you're half way through watching nineties classic "Home Alone 2: Lost in New York". Or maybe "Game of Thrones". Whatever, I don't keep up with TV. The point is you need a quick fix, so you grab a lamp from the bedroom or stick a towel under the sink. That'll do, you think. I'll sort it out properly tomorrow. Future me totally has this one covered.
Three months later, you still haven't bothered to buy a new light bulb and the towel is now so sodden it smells like it crawled out of a music festival toilet. Well congratulations, you have just engaged in what is rather grandly known as "Geoengineering". If you can't fix the original problem, add something on that will kind of sort it out for a while, maybe. More technically, it's an attempt to reduce the Earth's temperature, without actually dealing with the problem, the emission of fossil fuels at an unprecedented rate. Treating the symptoms but not the cause, to switch metaphors for a moment.
The best way to explain this is probably with an example; luckily for me Vaughn and Lenton (2011) have published a 46 page review of current geoengineering proposals for me to choose from. The citation is at the bottom, but if you can't access it for pay-to-view reasons, then the wikipedia page is as thorough a guide as any. So, to start with a sane and boring idea, reforestation of land (growing more trees) would lead to an increase in photosynthesis, decreasing the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. I don't see why anyone would get behind that idea though, when we have this option right out of a science fiction movie:
That is a computer graphic of a "Solar Shade", a giant mirror in space. In an idea so mind bogglingly stupid it might just be genius, the logic runs as follows: i) We get heat from the suns rays. ii) It's currently a bit hot. iii) Less sun = less hot. iv) mirrors reflect light and therefore heat. v) YOU GUYS WE SHOULD TOTALLY BUILD A MIRROR IN SPACE. To reflect enough solar energy to counteract the current warming the total reflective area would have to be approx. 4.7 million km^2. That is not only putting the equivalent of India in space, but sending up Mongolia to keep it company. Not only that, but we would have to add at least 1 Belgium per year if we continued at the current rate of warming. The most recent plan for this, was not the giant disc imagined above, but 1.6 trillion tiny mirrors of half a meter diameter instead. This plan does presume the mirrors wouldn't be stolen by a horde of magpies on the way up, acting together at last for the biggest heist in stealing shiny things history. Although this is all quite entertaining, it is complete madness, and sounds like some kind of supervillain chicanery. It will not happen. Plus, Belgium would probably object to being repeatedly fired into space.
Somewhere between the two extremes of planting trees and firing a silvery cloud into orbit, there are the wacky but plausible suggestions like cloud ships, which would use sea spray to add to the particles in the atmosphere, creating more clouds, reflecting more sunlight. Unmanned yachts, using the power of the wind to wander around the oceans on a lonely mission to fire as much of the sea upwards as yachtily possible.
Despite my derision, I do think geoengineering solutions are important. The real truth of the matter is, we won't cut carbon emissions enough to avoid seeing the impacts of global warming. Something must be done. Hopefully that something will involve a shift to renewable energy, which will be an inevitability when we run out of oil anyway. Until then though, our options are either to adapt to the new world we find ourselves in, or attempt to delay the inevitable change through these halfway solutions. Whatever the overall strategy, I hope we as a species aren't vain enough to think reflection is the only way to go, because the moment the space mirror launches is the moment I lose any residual hope for humanity.
Vaughan, N., & Lenton, T. (2011). A review of climate geoengineering proposals Climatic Change, 109 (3-4), 745-790 DOI: 10.1007/s10584-011-0027-7
Three months later, you still haven't bothered to buy a new light bulb and the towel is now so sodden it smells like it crawled out of a music festival toilet. Well congratulations, you have just engaged in what is rather grandly known as "Geoengineering". If you can't fix the original problem, add something on that will kind of sort it out for a while, maybe. More technically, it's an attempt to reduce the Earth's temperature, without actually dealing with the problem, the emission of fossil fuels at an unprecedented rate. Treating the symptoms but not the cause, to switch metaphors for a moment.
The best way to explain this is probably with an example; luckily for me Vaughn and Lenton (2011) have published a 46 page review of current geoengineering proposals for me to choose from. The citation is at the bottom, but if you can't access it for pay-to-view reasons, then the wikipedia page is as thorough a guide as any. So, to start with a sane and boring idea, reforestation of land (growing more trees) would lead to an increase in photosynthesis, decreasing the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. I don't see why anyone would get behind that idea though, when we have this option right out of a science fiction movie:
That is a computer graphic of a "Solar Shade", a giant mirror in space. In an idea so mind bogglingly stupid it might just be genius, the logic runs as follows: i) We get heat from the suns rays. ii) It's currently a bit hot. iii) Less sun = less hot. iv) mirrors reflect light and therefore heat. v) YOU GUYS WE SHOULD TOTALLY BUILD A MIRROR IN SPACE. To reflect enough solar energy to counteract the current warming the total reflective area would have to be approx. 4.7 million km^2. That is not only putting the equivalent of India in space, but sending up Mongolia to keep it company. Not only that, but we would have to add at least 1 Belgium per year if we continued at the current rate of warming. The most recent plan for this, was not the giant disc imagined above, but 1.6 trillion tiny mirrors of half a meter diameter instead. This plan does presume the mirrors wouldn't be stolen by a horde of magpies on the way up, acting together at last for the biggest heist in stealing shiny things history. Although this is all quite entertaining, it is complete madness, and sounds like some kind of supervillain chicanery. It will not happen. Plus, Belgium would probably object to being repeatedly fired into space.
Somewhere between the two extremes of planting trees and firing a silvery cloud into orbit, there are the wacky but plausible suggestions like cloud ships, which would use sea spray to add to the particles in the atmosphere, creating more clouds, reflecting more sunlight. Unmanned yachts, using the power of the wind to wander around the oceans on a lonely mission to fire as much of the sea upwards as yachtily possible.
Despite my derision, I do think geoengineering solutions are important. The real truth of the matter is, we won't cut carbon emissions enough to avoid seeing the impacts of global warming. Something must be done. Hopefully that something will involve a shift to renewable energy, which will be an inevitability when we run out of oil anyway. Until then though, our options are either to adapt to the new world we find ourselves in, or attempt to delay the inevitable change through these halfway solutions. Whatever the overall strategy, I hope we as a species aren't vain enough to think reflection is the only way to go, because the moment the space mirror launches is the moment I lose any residual hope for humanity.
Vaughan, N., & Lenton, T. (2011). A review of climate geoengineering proposals Climatic Change, 109 (3-4), 745-790 DOI: 10.1007/s10584-011-0027-7
Tuesday, May 14, 2013
Relocation, relocation, relocation.
Climate Refugee is one of many confusing terms in the climate change lexicon. If you take it literally, it surely means someone who is constantly running from mean weather conditions, never able to settle down. As soon as I feel conditions returning to a mathematical average, man, I'm gone.
Unfortunately, that's not what it means. Instead, it refers to populations forced to leave their homes, because sea level rise has suddenly made living on a tidal flat a pretty horrendous idea, or because rainfall stopped bothering to show up in your neck of the woods and suddenly you live in a desert.
I'm talking about this today because UK newspaper the Guardian has launched a news minisite on the plight of Newtok in Alaska, where river erosion is forcing the inhabitants to abandon the village*. This is obviously a very stressful event for all concerned and a sign of things to come for the Alaskan natives. Alaska isn't a very large percentage of the worlds populous though, so what else is going on globally; how big a problem is this, and how big a problem will it become?
Yeah, the thing is, I don't know the answer to any of that. I've nonchalantly poised a question which is far too hard to cover in this short blog post and now I'm going to try and ramble my way to a reasonable conclusion. Wish me luck.
To start with, it's complicated because it's hard to separate the idea of climate refugees from environmental refugees, a term used to differentiate between people fleeing from persecution (political refugees) and natural disasters. Myers (2002) reports a "conservative estimate" of 25 million environmental refugees in 1995. However, as the paper discusses, extreme poverty often serves as a "push" factor for these refugees. A good example of this would be drought in the sub-Saharan Africa region. So it's hard to assess whether changes in number of refugees are due to political factors or an increase in environmental problems.
Even putting aside the political cases, it isn't usually possible to attribute one particular event to climate change. Take the 2012 North-Indian floods, which relocated 6.9 million people out of 34 million environmental refugees globally in 2012. The event occurred because the monsoons brought more rainfall than average in that particular region. Is that going to become a trend over the next fifty years, or is it just part of natural variability? Another question to file under "ongoing research". Besides, not all environmental relocation is linked to climate change. As far as I know, nobody has yet linked Earthquakes to climate change, although the CNN newsreader from my first ever blog might give it a go.
The headline figure for climate refugees is usually 200 million at risk by the year 2050, and the various versions of this prediction were reviewed by Biermann and Boas (2010). A lot of that number comes from an increase in severe weather and storm surges on top of mean sea level rise (which we are confident about). Since we don't really know exactly how severe weather will change, these numbers are very uncertain. This isn't a criticism of the papers I've cited here by the way. We have to get an idea about how climate change will effect society and, although uncertain, examining changes in flooding, droughts, hurricanes and the like seems the only reasonable way to go about it. A very confident prediction of "It'll be slightly hotter most days" isn't as useful for decision making as "we're uncertain, but we think more floods will mean you can't grow anything here anymore. Might think about moving".
So what can we take away from all this? Other than real life sociological problems have lots of co-related causes and it's hard to predict how they will change in the future. Well, I guess you can fall into two camps. a) we don't really know what will happen, let's just hope it's not bad. or b) we don't really know what will happen, let's plan for the future in case we have to suddenly move 200 million people around. I guess as a species we just have to trust our leaders to make the responsible choice. The footnote I've written beneath my conclusion is not helping me here, I'm going to be honest.
*As an irrelevant footnote, the article has some interesting Sarah Palin quotes from when she was back as Governor of Alaska and all about the climate change issue. It's funny how that changed when she became the VP candidate to appease hardcore republicans. It's almost like Politicians base policies and principles on what is most likely to get them elected rather than rationality, any particular manifesto, or some kind of ethical code. What? Oh.
Unfortunately, that's not what it means. Instead, it refers to populations forced to leave their homes, because sea level rise has suddenly made living on a tidal flat a pretty horrendous idea, or because rainfall stopped bothering to show up in your neck of the woods and suddenly you live in a desert.
I'm talking about this today because UK newspaper the Guardian has launched a news minisite on the plight of Newtok in Alaska, where river erosion is forcing the inhabitants to abandon the village*. This is obviously a very stressful event for all concerned and a sign of things to come for the Alaskan natives. Alaska isn't a very large percentage of the worlds populous though, so what else is going on globally; how big a problem is this, and how big a problem will it become?
Yeah, the thing is, I don't know the answer to any of that. I've nonchalantly poised a question which is far too hard to cover in this short blog post and now I'm going to try and ramble my way to a reasonable conclusion. Wish me luck.
To start with, it's complicated because it's hard to separate the idea of climate refugees from environmental refugees, a term used to differentiate between people fleeing from persecution (political refugees) and natural disasters. Myers (2002) reports a "conservative estimate" of 25 million environmental refugees in 1995. However, as the paper discusses, extreme poverty often serves as a "push" factor for these refugees. A good example of this would be drought in the sub-Saharan Africa region. So it's hard to assess whether changes in number of refugees are due to political factors or an increase in environmental problems.
Even putting aside the political cases, it isn't usually possible to attribute one particular event to climate change. Take the 2012 North-Indian floods, which relocated 6.9 million people out of 34 million environmental refugees globally in 2012. The event occurred because the monsoons brought more rainfall than average in that particular region. Is that going to become a trend over the next fifty years, or is it just part of natural variability? Another question to file under "ongoing research". Besides, not all environmental relocation is linked to climate change. As far as I know, nobody has yet linked Earthquakes to climate change, although the CNN newsreader from my first ever blog might give it a go.
The headline figure for climate refugees is usually 200 million at risk by the year 2050, and the various versions of this prediction were reviewed by Biermann and Boas (2010). A lot of that number comes from an increase in severe weather and storm surges on top of mean sea level rise (which we are confident about). Since we don't really know exactly how severe weather will change, these numbers are very uncertain. This isn't a criticism of the papers I've cited here by the way. We have to get an idea about how climate change will effect society and, although uncertain, examining changes in flooding, droughts, hurricanes and the like seems the only reasonable way to go about it. A very confident prediction of "It'll be slightly hotter most days" isn't as useful for decision making as "we're uncertain, but we think more floods will mean you can't grow anything here anymore. Might think about moving".
So what can we take away from all this? Other than real life sociological problems have lots of co-related causes and it's hard to predict how they will change in the future. Well, I guess you can fall into two camps. a) we don't really know what will happen, let's just hope it's not bad. or b) we don't really know what will happen, let's plan for the future in case we have to suddenly move 200 million people around. I guess as a species we just have to trust our leaders to make the responsible choice. The footnote I've written beneath my conclusion is not helping me here, I'm going to be honest.
*As an irrelevant footnote, the article has some interesting Sarah Palin quotes from when she was back as Governor of Alaska and all about the climate change issue. It's funny how that changed when she became the VP candidate to appease hardcore republicans. It's almost like Politicians base policies and principles on what is most likely to get them elected rather than rationality, any particular manifesto, or some kind of ethical code. What? Oh.
Tuesday, May 07, 2013
Make Chardonhay while the sun shines
I'll start this blog with a confession; it might just be an excuse to make terrible wine based puns like the one in the title, so I'd be grapeful if you would go easy on me. Eh? Eh? No, looks like nobody's going with it. Not going to fly this one. They're sauvignone of it. Alright, I'll stop. It is nice to have a topic which isn't all doom and gloom for once though, it's not easy trying to write a climate blog that doesn't descend into weeping sobs at the state of humanity somewhere in the conclusion. Luckily, today I'm discussing a paper published at the start of April in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences: Climate Change, Wine, and conservation.
The hypothesis of this paper by Hannah et al. is fairly simple; if the climate is different in the future, the wine growing regions of the world (France, Australia, California etc.) will see different mean conditions and might therefore be better/worse at growing wine grapes. Testing the idea is not so simple, because there are a lot of variables that decide a good growing region; temperature, water availability, humidity, soil quality...the list goes on. So the problem isn't trivial, but like the good viticulturists they are, Hannah et al. have developed a method and published what they found.
I don't want to get too bogged down in the methodology, since it's all in the paper I linked to and it's the pretty figures everybody wants to see, but I'll summarize briefly since it's hard to make conclusions if you don't know what the paper actually did. The authors took the current climatology from weather stations around the world over the period 1961-2000 and compared that to a projected average for 2041-2060 from 17 different global climate models. To condense this into one usable variable, they then applied a sustainability model to map out which areas are most affected, assuming carbon emissions continue to increase as they are now. The map in the paper is included below.
So here, the red areas are currently growing wine, the green areas will continue to grow wine in 2050 and the blue areas are new regions that will be able to support vineyards. As you can see, if the authors are right, there will be some serious shifts in the regions we buy our wine from, particularly in the US and Europe. It's looking good for the North Eastern states and bad for California, while over on the other side of the Atlantic, Devon could be the next champagne (that just sounds wrong) while the Mediterranean might be losing a lot of it's growing potential.
I think there is certainly room for healthy scepticism in a paper like this. For a start, Global climate models are notoriously bad at predicting rainfall regionally and the authors also use a Human Influence Index to account for things such as population changes, which must have quite a large room for error. However, that doesn't mean we should just throw our hands up and stop trying. It's an interesting approach, and changes in wine grape distributions are obviously important economically as well as being indicators of the movement of other types of plant and animals in a warming world.
So I think that's the end of today's blog. Overall, an interesting and ambitious paper which serves as just one example of how things might be different 40 years from now. I'm sure I had something else to add here, but I can't think what it was. I'm drawing a Sauvignon Blanc.
Hannah L, Roehrdanz PR, Ikegami M, Shepard AV, Shaw MR, Tabor G, Zhi L, Marquet PA, & Hijmans RJ (2013). Climate change, wine, and conservation. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 110 (17), 6907-12 PMID: 23569231
The hypothesis of this paper by Hannah et al. is fairly simple; if the climate is different in the future, the wine growing regions of the world (France, Australia, California etc.) will see different mean conditions and might therefore be better/worse at growing wine grapes. Testing the idea is not so simple, because there are a lot of variables that decide a good growing region; temperature, water availability, humidity, soil quality...the list goes on. So the problem isn't trivial, but like the good viticulturists they are, Hannah et al. have developed a method and published what they found.
I don't want to get too bogged down in the methodology, since it's all in the paper I linked to and it's the pretty figures everybody wants to see, but I'll summarize briefly since it's hard to make conclusions if you don't know what the paper actually did. The authors took the current climatology from weather stations around the world over the period 1961-2000 and compared that to a projected average for 2041-2060 from 17 different global climate models. To condense this into one usable variable, they then applied a sustainability model to map out which areas are most affected, assuming carbon emissions continue to increase as they are now. The map in the paper is included below.
So here, the red areas are currently growing wine, the green areas will continue to grow wine in 2050 and the blue areas are new regions that will be able to support vineyards. As you can see, if the authors are right, there will be some serious shifts in the regions we buy our wine from, particularly in the US and Europe. It's looking good for the North Eastern states and bad for California, while over on the other side of the Atlantic, Devon could be the next champagne (that just sounds wrong) while the Mediterranean might be losing a lot of it's growing potential.
I think there is certainly room for healthy scepticism in a paper like this. For a start, Global climate models are notoriously bad at predicting rainfall regionally and the authors also use a Human Influence Index to account for things such as population changes, which must have quite a large room for error. However, that doesn't mean we should just throw our hands up and stop trying. It's an interesting approach, and changes in wine grape distributions are obviously important economically as well as being indicators of the movement of other types of plant and animals in a warming world.
So I think that's the end of today's blog. Overall, an interesting and ambitious paper which serves as just one example of how things might be different 40 years from now. I'm sure I had something else to add here, but I can't think what it was. I'm drawing a Sauvignon Blanc.
Hannah L, Roehrdanz PR, Ikegami M, Shepard AV, Shaw MR, Tabor G, Zhi L, Marquet PA, & Hijmans RJ (2013). Climate change, wine, and conservation. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 110 (17), 6907-12 PMID: 23569231
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