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Climate Change: An Inter-disciplinary Approach to Problem Solving�(AOSS 480 // NRE 480)

Richard B. Rood

Cell: 301-526-8572

2525 Space Research Building (North Campus)

rbrood@umich.edu

http://aoss.engin.umich.edu/people/rbrood

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Winter 2015

January 15, 2015

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Class Information and News

  • Ctools site: AOSS_SNRE_480_001_W15

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    • Record of course

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  • A tumbler site to help me remember
    • http://openclimate.tumblr.com/

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Required Reading and Response

  • Assignment on CTools Site

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Resources and Recommended Reading

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Outline: Class 3, Winter 2015

  • Organization: structure and language
    • Identification of complexity
  • Knowledge system / examination of successful problem solving
    • Formal construct or theory to approach problems
  • Breaking the problem down 🡪
    • to, ultimately, build back up
  • The need to evaluate data, information and knowledge

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A question for short discussion

  • Why haven’t we done more about climate change than we have?

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Assumption

  • That we are satisfied that the scientific investigation of climate change is robust, and we want to incorporate knowledge about climate change into our jobs or our daily lives.
    • How do we do that?

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Science, Mitigation, Adaptation Framework

Mitigation is controlling the amount of CO2 we put in the atmosphere.

Adaptation is responding to changes that might occur from added CO2

It’s not an either / or argument.

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Responses to the Climate Change Problem

Autonomous/

Individual

Policy/

Societal

Reactive

Anticipatory

Adaptation

Mitigation

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Climate Change Relationships

  • Consumption // Population // Energy

CLIMATE CHANGE

ENERGY

POPULATION

CONSUMPTION

SOCIETAL SUCCESS

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Knowledge System

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Knowledge System: Translation

  • Need to bring together disparate information and different points of view to develop strategies for applied problem solving
  • Key to development of successful strategies: iterative process or co-development with information providers and information users

Cash et al: 2002

Lemos & Morehouse, 2005

Dilling & Lemos, 2011

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Knowledge System, Science Focused

  • Two Points
    • This figure overstates the role of “science” in the knowledge systems.
    • I choose not to draw a line between the two bubbles, as the relation between “science” and the application is not direct.

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Science & Research

Applications

Loading Dock Model

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Knowledge System, Science Focused

Dilling & Lemos, 2011

  • Information brokers
  • Collaborative group processes
  • Embedded capacity
  • Boundary Organizations
  • Knowledge Networks

Science & Research

Applications

Cash et al: 2002

  • Boundary Management
  • Dual Accountability
  • Boundary Objects

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Knowledge System, Science Focused

Dilling & Lemos, 2011

  • Information brokers
  • Collaborative group processes
  • Embedded capacity
  • Boundary Organizations
  • Knowledge Networks

Science & Research

Applications

Cash et al: 2002

  • Boundary Management
  • Dual Accountability
  • Boundary Objects

Cash et al: 2002

  • Legitimacy
  • Credibility
  • Salience

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Credibility, Legitimacy, Salience

  • Credibility is an attribute of scientific adequacy.
  • Legitimacy is an attribute of objectivity, fairness, and a lack of political bias.
  • Salience requires that information be relevant to the problem to be addressed.

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Heuristic Knowledge System

Science & Research

Applications

Disciplinary

Knowledge

Political

Local Reality

Budget

Etc.

These elements sit in a complex and changing relationship within any specific application, as well as across multiple applications.

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In Complex Problem Solving Bring Attention to Interfaces

  • Climate – Energy – Population – Economic Success
  • Climate – Health – Economic Success -
  • Climate – Agriculture – Population – etc.
  • etc …

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  • What are the major sensitivities?
  • What is entrée into the field and access to experts?
    • access, scan, and evaluate knowledge
  • Interpretation, translation and communication
    • salient communication
    • not dumbing down

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Useful and Usability

  • Scientists often talk about the usefulness of their data (observations or projections)
  • Practitioners talk about the usability of data, information and knowledge
    • Practitioners?
      • Urban planners
      • Public health
      • Ecosystem managers
      • Water managers
      • …

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Salience is most Challenging

  • Usable Science? Tang and Dessai (2012)
    • U.K. Climate Projections 2009 (UKCP09)
    • Bayesian probabilistic projections – highly quantitative uncertainty descriptions
    • Increases credibility and legitimacy
    • Reduces salience and usability
      • Understanding and interpretation
      • Information required
    • Strategy to increase salience
      • Tailoring to adaptation context or problem

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How do we organize problem solving?

Observations

Predictions

Data …

Loading Dock Model

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Knowledge at the Loading Dock

  • Information, data knowledge at the loading dock (“made available”) is necessary, but it is not sufficient to assure usability and use.

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Motivator: Environmental Behavior

  • Hines, Hungerford, Tomera, Responsible Environmental Behavior, 1987.
    • We need to correct “[t]he erroneous assumption…that skills evolve naturally from knowledge”
    • What to do and the skills to do it
  • Rood:SolvingRood:Solving the Problems of Climate Change and Sustainability, Michigan Journal of Sustainability, 2, 2014.

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Breaking the Problem Down

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Responses to the Climate Change Problem

Autonomous/

Individual

Policy/

Societal

Reactive

Anticipatory

Adaptation

Mitigation

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Scientific Investigation

OBSERVATIONS

THEORY

EXPERIMENT

Knowledge Generation

Reduction

Disciplinary

Problem Solving

Unification

Integration

(perhaps not unique)

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Break into pieces 🡪 “granules”

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Granularity

  • No matter how we cut through this problem we come to the conclusion that there is a lot of granularity within the problem. This granularity represents complexity, which must be used to develop a portfolio of solutions rather than to classify the problem as intractable.

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The previous viewgraphs have introduced “granularity”

  • This is a classic short-term versus long-term problem.
    • Ethics
    • Economics
    • Reaction versus anticipation
  • Similarly, regional versus global
  • Rich and poor
  • Competing approaches
    • Mitigation versus adaptation
    • Transportation versus electrical generation
    • This versus that

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Reducing Climate Complexity

TEMPORAL

NEAR-TERM

LONG-TERM

SPATIAL

LOCAL

GLOBAL

WEALTH

Small scales inform large scales.

Large scales inform small scales.

Need to introduce spatial scales as well

Sandvik: Wealth and Climate Change

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How do we define time?

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What is short-term and long-term?

25 years

50 years

75 years

100 years

0 years

ENERGY SECURITY

ECONOMY

CLIMATE CHANGE

Pose that time scales for addressing climate change as a society are best defined by human dimensions. Length of infrastructure investment, accumulation of wealth over a lifetime, ...

LONG

SHORT

There are short-term issues important to climate change.

Election time scales

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Structure of Problem Solving�(http://glisaclimate.org/home )

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Skill Set

  • Analysis
    • Determination of knowledge that is important to the application
    • Distinguish between facts and inferences
    • Identify advocacy
  • Evaluation / Judgment
    • What is the quality of the knowledge?
  • Synthesis
    • How do pieces fit together?

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Some approaches to analysis

  • There are attributes of analysis and evaluation that are shared
    • Evaluation is intrinsic in the analysis process
    • Evaluation becomes more rigorous as the problem advances through its iterative steps

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Climate Change Relationships

  • Consumption // Population // Energy

CLIMATE CHANGE

ENERGY

POPULATION

CONSUMPTION

SOCIETAL SUCCESS

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Energy and Economic Success

The Bottomless Well:

Huber and Mills (2005)

What countries are missing from this figure?

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What has changed since 2005?

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Societal Success and Energy

Societal Success

Energy

High

High

High

Low

Low

Low

Low

High

This is what we know.

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Societal Success and Consumption

Consumption

High

High

High

Low

Low

Low

Low

High

Societal Success

High consumption is damaging.

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Population and Consumption

Population

Consumption

High

High

High

Low

Low

Low

Low

High

This is perilous and our path.

  • This is not likely in our lifetime.
  • Past CO2 emissions by small population

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Energy and Consumption

Energy

Consumption

High

High

High

Low

Low

Low

Low

High

This is perilous and our path.

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This thought model leads to

  • Economic success needs to be decoupled from
    • Consumption, Energy Use
  • Consumption needs to be decoupled from energy use.
  • Energy use needs to be decoupled from CO2 emissions to mitigate warming.
  • High population, high consumption, high energy use is not sustainable.
  • Have not considered other resources and other pollutants.

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Climate Change Relationships

  • Climate change is linked to consumption.
    • The economy depends on us consuming
    • Consuming generates the waste that causes climate change.
    • The consumption that has set us on this road of global warming has been by a relatively small percentage of the population.
      • Wealth is an important variable.
      • Hence, social equity is an issue.

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Solution Space: For Warming Problem

  • Our current behavior suggests the most desired solution is high energy, high consumption, which leads to the need for energy use to not pollute.

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  • Don’t forget about water. (And a myriad of other resources and sources of pollution.)

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Some challenges

  • If it was not clear when you woke up this morning, climate change touches every element of society.
    • It sits in relationship with some other fundamental societal challenges.
  • Solutions will be required to infiltrate all elements of society.
    • What sort of things scale to all society?
  • “Science,” though motivating and defining often not quantitatively or directly used of problem solution strategies.

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Reducing Climate Complexity

TEMPORAL

NEAR-TERM

LONG-TERM

SPATIAL

LOCAL

GLOBAL

WEALTH

Small scales inform large scales.

Large scales inform small scales.

Need to introduce spatial scales as well

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Space and Time

Time

Spatial

Large

Long

Large

Short

Small

Short

Small

Long

Classic Mitigation

Intuitively Doable

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Wealth and Time

Time

Wealth

Rich

Long

Rich

Short

Poor

Short

Poor

Long

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A couple of climate variables

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Temperature and Precipitation

Precipitation

Temperature

Hot

Wet

Hot

Dry

Cold

Dry

Cold

Wet

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The Need to Evaluate

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Return to Structure of Problem Solving

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Common Structure Problem Solving

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Elements of Evaluation

  • Source of information
  • Process for development of knowledge
    • Scientific method?
    • Simple observation
    • Externality
  • Peer reviewed?
  • Reproduced?

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Elements of Evaluation: Data

  • Spatial and temporal homogeneity
  • Instrument calibration
  • Comparison to observations and standards
  • Statistical characteristics
    • Statistics common quantitative language across many fields
  • Relevant to my application
    • Conform to existing practice in an application field

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Experience from Climate Change Problem�(We are early in this process)�http://www.glisaclimate.org/climate-information-guide

What Has Happened?

What Will Happen?

Vulnerability

Risk

Benefit

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Characteristics of Successful Use

  • Frequent Characteristics of Successful Use of Climate Knowledge and Data
    • Local observation or experience
    • Alignment of projections with regional observations or experience
    • Alignment with known vulnerability
    • Alignment with the narrative of the models

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Projections

Station

Satellite

Reanalysis

Downscale

(localized)

Ensembles

Data Space

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Summary: Class 3, Winter 2015

  • Organization: structure and language
    • Necessary to find an anchor
  • Knowledge system / examination of successful problem solving
    • Brings attention to end-to-end system
    • Reveals importance of interfaces
    • Interpretation, translation
    • Iterative, negotiation
    • Human aspects

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Summary: Class 3, Winter 2015

  • Breaking the problem down 🡪
    • Temporal, spatial, wealth, cultural values and norms
  • The need to evaluate data, information and knowledge
      • Statistics, statistics, statistics
    • Establishes credibility
    • Establishes legitimacy
    • Establishes salience
    • Establishes trust

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Summary: Class 3, Winter 2015

  • Evaluation: An important part of the climate knowledge system is the need to evaluate the suitability of data, information and knowledge for a particular application.  The unmet need for evaluation stands as a barrier to delivering the most appropriate and readily usable data for particular purposes.
    • Salience

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Summary: Class 3, Winter 2015

  • Human “Experts”: Human experts are an integral part of the knowledge system. Learn early to identify the needed expertise, stakeholders, find them, and involve them in problem solving. To accelerate problem solving focus on organization of human expertise and improving the efficiency of the human expert.
    • This is often contrary to the schoolbook approach of individuality, testing unique contributions. A paradigm shift.

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Outline: Class 3, Winter 2015

  • Organization: structure and language
    • Identification of complexity
  • Knowledge system / examination of successful problem solving
    • Formal construct or theory to approach problems
  • Breaking the problem down 🡪
    • to, ultimately, build back up
  • The need to evaluate data, information and knowledge