Climate Change in the Great Lakes Region
Speaker's Abstracts

Dr. Jeff Andresen
"Historical Climate Trends in Michigan and the Great Lakes Region"
Reliable instrumental measurements of climatological variables are available from the Great Lakes Region for approximately the past 120 years, which allow identification and investigation of temporal and spatial trends. Major trends across the region are spatially consistent, and are temporally somewhat similar to larger scale global and hemisphere trends including warming temperatures from approximately 1900 to 1940, followed by a cooling trend from the early 1940's to the late 1970's which was in turn followed by a second warming trend that began around 1980 and has continued to the present. Much of the warming trend during the past 2-3 decades has been associated with warmer minimum temperatures during the winter and spring seasons. Another important trend regionally has been an increase of precipitation since approximately 1940, although this increase has leveled off somewhat during the past decade. Seasonal snowfall totals have increased significantly during the past 2-3 decades in areas of the region frequented by lake-effect snowfall, which totals have remained steady or decreased slightly in non-lake effect areas Illustrations of these trends along with some examples of potential impacts will be presented.

Dr. Joe Arvai
"Five Obstacles to Effective Climate Policy: A Decision Science Perspective"
Climate change presents one of the biggest paradoxes facing society today. On the one hand, no environmental problem receives as much attention from the research community as climate change. Yet, from a decision making and policy perspective, no environmental problem seems to be the subject of as much foot-dragging as climate change. To explain the paradox, many have argued that climate uncertainty thwarts effective climate policy. Indeed, climate change is still plagued with uncertainty regarding the magnitude of its severity and long-term implications; feeding this uncertainty is the sheer complexity of climate change with manifold causes and consequences that range from the individual and local to the regional and global levels. Effective policy responses-in terms of both mitigation and adaptation-are therefore difficult to formulate, and at best are often based on educated guesses. So despite the vast resources already being devoted to the study of climate change, the way out of the paradox for many is to devote even more resources to research. In contrast to this prevailing view, this paper argues that additional research-for the moment, at least-is not the answer. Instead, better and more responsive climate policy decisions can be achieved today if decision makers can address five surmountable challenges:

  • First, decision makers and analysts must work to overcome the psychological numbing that the climate change debate encourages.
  • Second, appropriate attention must be paid to identifying the climate management objectives of affected stakeholders.
  • Third, decision makers must work with local stakeholders and technical experts to identify sensible and decision-focused indicators of climate change impacts.
  • Fourth, policy makers must develop a formal framework for learning about climate change and climate policy over both time and space.
  • And only after these initial steps are taken should policy makers address the fifth challenge: Identifying subjects for, and funding, additional-but decision-focused-research about climate change.

Dr. Ben Bradshaw (co-author with Barry Smit, Ellen Wall, and Susanna Reid)
"Incorporating Adaptation to Climate Change into Farm Management and Agricultural Policy"
Climate change impact studies have evolved from a models that focus on estimating the "cost" of climate change to participatory studies that focus on identifying what can be done by agricultural decision-makers to reduce risks associated with climate change and realize opportunities. From such studies it is possible to identify the conditions that producers have to manage, the role of climate and weather, the adaptive strategies employed by producers, the risks and opportunities that can be expected with climate change, and the effectiveness of existing measures and programs to deal with a changing environment.

Results from Ontario show that climate forces are experienced in combination with changing and uncertain economic, market and policy conditions. The climate-related conditions that challenge operators are not the norms but the extremes, including droughts, very hot periods, intense rains, wet falls, snow-free winters, and conditions conducive to pests and diseases. Changes in the frequency, location and intensity of extremes are widely expected with climate change. The production and economic risks are managed via a wide array of farm-level strategies, financial measures and crop insurance. There are few, if any, measures directed solely at climate change. In most of these adaptations, climate change is considered as one of a suite of forces and is incorporated into farm management and policies.

Dr. Bill Easterling
"Climate Change and Agriculture-Is Uncertain Information Usable Knowledge?"
Considerable progress has been made in understanding the implications of future climate change for agricultural systems across a range of scales and geographic locations. After more than three decades of focused research, it is now known with a high degree of confidence that even slight warming is likely to challenge tropical crop production while benefiting temperate crops. The problem is that little of this information has been put into a framework that allows systematic evaluation of uncertainty. I assert that information on the effects of climate change on agriculture is usable knowledge for decision makers provided that the uncertainties are explicit and traceable. In this paper, the major sources of uncertainty concerning the estimation of effects of climate change on food security and potential for adaptation are identified. They are classified into two categories: structural and parametric. Examples from both categories are given. The development of ensemble solution spaces for alternative world futures is proposed as a way to deliver usable knowledge to decision makers.

Scudder Mackey
"Climate Change Impacts and Adaptation Strategies for Great Lakes Nearshore and Coastal Systems"
Within the Great Lakes basin, individual species, biological communities, and the ecosystem as a whole have adapted to a natural range of physical and environmental conditions that are controlled by the interaction of master variables - climate, geology, and hydrology. Climate change has the potential to significantly alter the physical integrity of the Great Lakes by altering the natural processes and pathways that convey energy, water, and materials through the basin with impacts to sustainable water resources, habitat, biodiversity, and ecological function. Specifically, climate change may directly affect the processes and pathways that control the timing and movement of water through riverine, coastal margin, and nearshore systems, including: 1) spatial and temporal changes in flow regime (water depth, velocity, flow patterns), 2) thermal effects (temperature), and 3) altered connections within the land-water interface. The impact of these changes will be first observed in coastal margin areas where changes in flow and lake-level regimes will directly impact connectivity and alter hydroperiods in shallow-water environments. Initially, these effects will be localized but will become cumulative through time. Altered weather patterns and changing water levels will modify the energy distribution and nearshore coastal processes that shape and maintain Great Lakes shorelines and nearshore habitats. Protection and restoration of natural processes, pathways, and landscapes will improve the resiliency and regenerative capacity of physical and biological systems to resist potential long-term natural and anthropogenic stressors resulting from continued growth and development, increased water withdrawals, potential diversions, and other effects of climate change. Maintaining a sustainable ecosystem requires a "balanced" approach to ecosystem protection and restoration - an approach that includes consideration of sustainable natural processes, pathways, and landscapes as part of a comprehensive protection and adaptation strategy for the Great Lakes in the face of ongoing climate change.

Linda Mortsch
"Decision-making in the Great Lakes: Challenges of Mainstreaming Adaptation to Climate Change"
Since the mid 1980s there has been dialogue and research on climate change in the Great Lakes Basin that is relevant to decision-making. An historical survey describes some of the top of mind issues and research needs that emerged from selected groups in the Basin based on their awareness and understanding of climate change and capacity to act. Examining the evolution of the climate change issue within the Great Lakes Basin provides context for the addressing the current challenge of "mainstreaming" adaptation to climate change - incorporating climate change information in day-to-day decision-making in order to reduce the impacts of climate change. While adapting to climate change is gaining recognition as a response to climate change in the Great Lakes, there is minimal action. Using insights from water resource managers involved in water quantity and quality issues, this paper explores some of the barriers to focusing on future climate conditions and developing anticipatory, proactive adaptation strategies in water management. It also highlights some of the opportunities that are emerging and the research and information needs that would be useful to decision-makers.

Dr. Susi Moser
"The Contextual Importance of Uncertainty in Climate-Sensitive Decision-Making: Toward an Integrative Decision-Centered Screening Tool"
Weather and climate information is not a priori important to decision-making, nor is the uncertainty within it. Even what might be the most scintillating area of the unknown for the scientists curious to explore it may have no bearing whatsoever on the day-to-day or even once-in-a-lifetime decisions of a policy-maker or resource manager. The initial reason may simply be that the decision-maker has no clear understanding of how her decisions are climate-sensitive. Or maybe the reason is that the decisions are simply not particularly sensitive to different climate futures. With rapid and progressive climate changes, however, the latter case will become increasingly rare in the future. In the meantime, so many aspects about climate change and its impacts in specific regions such as the Great Lakes remain incompletely understood, and some will never be entirely predictable. Priorities for exploring and assessing these uncertainties have to be set. Thus - if we are indeed interested in effectively connecting the best available scientific information about climate change with the needs of decision-makers - the challenge is to identify which scientific information really matters to the decisions at hand, and within that, which uncertainties are most influential on the decisions to be made. These can then be explored, better characterized, and effectively explained. This paper presents a step-by-step process to identify, provide, and communicate which (uncertain) information really is needed for climate-sensitive decision-making. It is primarily directed at scientists interested in working closely with decision-makers, but also challenges decision-makers to identify what information they need, when, and how, and convey those needs to researchers. If successful, the proposed screening tool could serve as a "boundary object" that can help facilitate interactions between scientists and practitioners and lead to more satisfactory and effective decision-making in the face of abiding climate uncertainty.

Dr. Terry Root
"Global Change in Plants and Animals: A Fingerprint for Warming & Evidence of Cause"
Global warming creates diverse biological changes across all continents and for a wide variety of animals and plants. These include: 1) shifts in densities of species and in their ranges-toward the poles and up in elevation, 2) changes in the timing of events (e.g., earlier blooming and migratory bird arrivals), 3) changes in behaviors, morphology, gene frequencies, and other traits, and 4) increases in the rate of extinctions.

The strong correlations between species changes, especially changes in phenology, and changes in local temperatures have been used to determine if human activities have contributed measurably to the observed warming. Temperature predictions from Global Circulation Models (GCMs) can be derived using only natural forcings (e.g., volcanic dust), only human forcings (e.g., CO2 emissions), or a combination of both natural and human forcings. By comparing the observed changes in species with these differently forced temperature predictions we can see the influence of natural and anthropogenic causes. When only natural forcings were used, the associations between the predicted temperatures and observed changes in species were quite weak, with only anthropogenic forcings they were stronger, and with a combination of both forcings the fit was quite strong. Therefore, humans are quite likely causing a measurable amount of the regional warming that has caused changes in wild species.

Documenting and publicizing changes in plants and animals is an important contribution toward the critical step of raising public awareness, and gaining support for reducing emissions. Going from documenting changes to protecting species is a daunting task, and is best approached as a dialog between scientists, managers, planners, and policy makers. Key questions include: What kind of information is needed to identify taxa most at risk? What criteria should be used to triage the species at risk, given our finite resources (dollars, time, political will and space)? How do we manage to increase the resilience of ecological systems to warming? How do we identify potential climate refugia that might allow sensitive species to persist longer (i.e., buy time)? What changes in the structure of management agencies will allow them to react quickly to surprises and changes in priorities?

Tools and approaches that could help promote dialog and help buffer species from climate change in the Great Lakes, include:

  • Use of a Strategic Cyclical Scaling investigative framework. "Strategic" because the questions investigated are those that will address a problem. "Cyclical Scaling" because examinations at the large scale can help indicate the most profitable small-scale studies, and then going back to the large-scale can help validate findings at the small scale.
  • Tools developed for risk assessment & methods for quantifying/comparing uncertainty associated with climate change.
  • Specialized mapping techniques for describing the degree of change predicted for different locations.
  • Ecological "Win-win" actions such as restoring top predators, and restoring natural disturbance regimes, which promote healthy, resilient ecosystems.
  • Linking carbon markets to the funding needed to implement various management tools.

Joel Scheraga
"Linking Science to Decision Making in the Great Lakes Region"
How does one provide timely and useful scientific information about climate change to decision makers in the Great Lakes Region so they can make more informed decisions? Decision makers and resource managers are becoming increasingly aware that climate change may have important implications for the work they do and attainment of their goals, and should therefore be an additional consideration in their decision making processes. Consequently, there is a growing demand for scientific information, data, and tools to inform and facilitate decisions.

There has been a rush of activity by the climate research community to meet this demand for "decision support." But skeptics still question the feasibility of conducting any scientifically-sound, policy-relevant assessments of the potential impacts of climate change. Even if one believes that credible assessments can be done, little work has been done to help guide the investment of scarce research dollars towards the highest-priority decision support activities, and to ensure that support is provided in the most effective way possible.

This paper addresses three key questions confronting the climate change research community: (1) Given the current state of science, is it possible to conduct the type of place-based assessments of the potential impacts of climate change that are necessary to inform decision makers in the Great Lakes Region? (2) If assessments can be done, how can any research institution efficiently allocate scarce resources among the multitude of climate-sensitive decisions and opportunities that exist to provide decision support? (3) Once "priority" decisions have been identified, what is the most effective way to provide decision support? There remain diverse notions about what constitutes effective decision support, and work needs to be done to understand the strengths and weaknesses of different approaches when applied in different contexts.

Dr. Steve Schneider
"Key Vulnerabilities and the Risk of "Dangerous" Climate Change"
To understand and identify "key vulnerabilities" and their relationship with "dangerous" climate change requires a conceptual framework, followed by a discussion of the key components and the methods that scientists use to quantify uncertainties in assessing dangerous climate change. Moreover, decision-makers need a broad set of assessment metrics that include more than a set of monetized market transaction categories in order to more equitably evaluate vulnerability of various species, sectors, regions or groups to climate changes.

"Key vulnerability" is used here to denote potentially significant impacts of climate change. These merit particular attention by policy-makers because they endanger the lives or well-being of people or other valued attributes (e.g., biodiversity preservation) of climate-sensitive systems. Key vulnerabilities are found in many social, economic, biological, and geophysical systems. The identification of such key vulnerabilities is intended to provide guidance for assessing levels and rates of climate change that, as termed by the 1992 U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, in its Article 2, (Note 2.) could be termed "dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system."(DAI) The definition of DAI must incorporate value judgments as well as assessments of the evolving state of scientific knowledge to inform the political processes.

Dr. Elke Weber
"Better Decision Making Under Climate Uncertainty: Lessons from Psychology"
Uncertainty is a barrier to predictability, a powerful human need. With uncertainties about climate variables and other decision inputs likely to increase in coming years, I review how people have evolved to cope with uncertainty by describing how they predict uncertain events and make decisions under uncertainty. I end with implications of these psychological insights for the communication of uncertain climate information.

People process information by two interconnected but distinct systems, one analytic, the other one experiential. Differences between decision makers are often related to the sophistication of the two processing systems and the relative weight given to the output from the two systems. Normative models of prediction focus on processes using the analytic system (probability calculus, Bayesian updating and belief revision). Psychological models also include processes using the experiential system, e.g., judgment heuristics like availability and representativeness that utilize past personal experience to make probability judgments. The experiential processing system is heavily driven by emotional reactions to situations. Emotions like worry or fear are powerful motivators for protective action, but the use of emotions to motivate behavior also has possible downsides. Research on psychological risk dimensions explains why some risks (e.g., nuclear power) spontaneously elicit strong feelings of concern and worry, while other risks (e.g., climate change) fail to do so.

Recently a distinction has been made between decisions from experience (where information about choice outcomes is acquired personally, by trial-and-error learning) and decisions from description (where this information comes in the form of statistical summaries). In situations involving small-probability high-impact events, choices can be differ dramatically, depending on how knowledge about the consequences of choice options was acquired. While prospect theory describes the typical overweighting of rare events in decisions from description, simple updating/learning models predict the underweighting of rare events in decisions from experience.

Dr. Julie Winkler
"Philosophy, Development, Application, and Communication of Future Scenarios for the Pileus Project"
At the core of most climate impact studies are one or more scenarios that describe potential future climate conditions. Central to any scenario development is the representation and communication of the uncertainty surrounding the scenarios. The Pileus Project, which is investigating the potential effects of climate variability and change on specialized agriculture and tourism in the Great Lakes region, required temperature and precipitation scenarios at a daily temporal resolution for multiple locations in the study area. An ensemble approach that included simulations from multiple Global Climate Models (GCMs), two greenhouse gas emissions estimates, and several downscaling methodologies was used to develop a suite of scenarios for each location for the period 1990-2099. The scenario suite includes a much larger number of possible outcomes compared to previous regional climate impact analyses and provides an improved estimate of uncertainty. The scenarios serve as the input to industry-relevant ecological, economic, and decision-making models. In addition, the temperature and precipitation scenarios are made available to stakeholders and other potential users as part of a web-based "Future Scenarios Tool." Unique to the Pileus Project is extensive audio-visual learning modules that familiarize users with the scenario development, the appropriate use of the scenarios, and the uncertainty surrounding the scenarios.

 

 

Last Updated: June 19, 2008
© 2004-2008 Michigan State University Board of Trustees
MSU is an affirmative-action, equal-opportunity employer.

Environmental Science & Policy Michigan State University