More Related Content
What's hot
What's hot (20)
Similar to Citizen Science: Climate Change Communication Through Participation
Similar to Citizen Science: Climate Change Communication Through Participation (20)
Recently uploaded
Recently uploaded (20)
Citizen Science: Climate Change Communication Through Participation
- 1. Citizen Science: Climate Change Communication Through Participation COURTNEY RIEGER M.SC. MENSA REGIONAL GATHERING 2017
- 2. Getting warmed up Climate change science, impacts, and solutions
- 3. But first! A few climate change FAQ’s.
- 4. Climate Change Is the climate getting warmer? How do we know its anthropogenic? Greenhouse gas percent absorption and the wavelength spectrum Carbon isotopes
- 5. Peixoto, J. P. and A.H. Oort, 1992, Physics of Climate. American Institute of Physics, 520pp.
- 6. So what?! CO2 is already in the atmosphere naturally…
- 7. Three Carbon Isotopes http://images.encarta.msn.com/xrefmedia/aencmed/targets/illus/ilt/T050525A.gif
- 9. Additional CO2 from fossil fuels has disrupted the carbon cycle natural processes that restore the balance = too slow
- 10. Yes… …but the sun!!
- 13. Arndt D S, Baringer M O and Johnson M R 2010 State of the climate in 2009 Bull. Am. Meteor. Soc. 91 S1– S224 Eds. www1.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/cmb/bams-sotc/2009/bams-sotc-2009-brochure-lo-rez.pdf
- 14. Photo credit: John Cook
- 15. Photo Credit: Ruth Dyson https://coalactionnetworkaotearoa.wordpress.com/2014/12/
- 16. “Getting the facts right” is no longer sufficient to manage the interface of science and policy Task of exploring the relevance of deep uncertainty and ignorance that limit our ability to establish facts
- 17. Scientists provide knowledge needed for designing climate policy and climate management There is a power factor in the struggle about other policy goals
- 18. Its complicated. Must employ a broader concept of communication, which goes beyond flows of information includes notions of credibility, legitimacy, authority, and entertainment Climate change communication is essentially represented by very different distinct spheres Science Policy Public media
- 19. Challenges in Communicating Climate Change invisibility of causes distant impacts lack of immediacy and direct experience of the impacts lack of gratification for taking mitigative actions disbelief in human's global influence complexity and uncertainty inadequate signals indicating the need for change perceptual limits and self-interest
- 20. Elk River Observed changes to the hydro-meteorological drivers of flooding in the valley suggests an increase in spring rainfall and winter snowpack Elevated future flood risk
- 21. Creating Resilient Communities Early warnings and early action Major gaps in communication to most vulnerable Information doesn’t lend to action How well do we need to know the future in order to act? Adaptivity – don’t wait for disaster to improve resilience Resilience – don’t bounce back, transition Crisis management vs managing for resilience
- 22. Citizen Science: OpenStreetMap Photo Credit:http://revoseek.com/wp- content/uploads/2012/03/Apple-Uses-OpenStreetMap-Instead-of- GoogleMaps.jpg
- 24. When stakeholders involved, less discontent and more prone to implementing decisions Community members populate map with city features validate remote mapping improving the quality of the map Image credit: Thomas Porter
- 26. Why is this significant?
- 27. Questions? Courtney Rieger M.Sc. CEO, Lighthouse Environmental Consulting & Communications
Editor's Notes
- Intro to me – thanks Vicki, and what I do
- First I’d like to say I’m NOT a climate scientist. I don’t go around studying ice sheets or earth’s temperature. My expertise lies in addressing the impacts of climate change and what we can do about it. We all hold different opinions on HOW it should be addressed but there is no debate on the science. The earth’s climate is changing and is projected to continue to change under a variety of emissions scenarios. Average temperatures will continue to increase, rainfall patterns will change, polar ice will melt at a faster rate and sea levels will rise. Extreme weather events (hurricanes, storms, flooding, drought, heat waves) are likely to become more common and more widespread, causing frequent and greater damage. These changes will affect food production, increase human mortality and morbidity and cause numerous other impacts for habitats we rely on.
- Is the climate getting warmer? – yes. By about 1C since 1900 according to the National Academy of Sciences. How do we know its caused by humans? Basic physics and chemistry, comparing observations with models, and patterns which we call fingerprints.
- This graph from the American Institute of Physics, shows absorptivity of what we call green house gases (methane, nitrous oxide, ozone, co2 and h2o vapor) as a function of wavelength of radiation. Who can tell me in micrometers the wavelength of ultra violent and infrared? The dominant absorbers of infrared radiation, or heat, are h2o, co2, and ch4, while ozone (as we well know) absorbs the sun’s ultraviolet radiation. It follows logically that the more of these gases in the atmosphere, the more heat is trapped. That’s visualized here. Note the cooling upper atmosphere.
- The element carbon appears in nature in three types, or isotopes. These isotopes differ in the number of neutrons that each atomic nucleus contains (6 for carbon 12, 7 for carbon 13, and 8 for carbon 14), along with the 6 protons in the nucleus of every carbon atom. Carbon 12, the lightest and most abundant of these isotopes, currently forms 98.9% of all the carbon on Earth, while carbon 13 provides almost all of the remainder.
- Carbon 14 atoms are far less abundant and make up the CO2 that is taken into plants, and animals which eat the plants. So, the relative abundance of carbon 14 in living organisms closely matches that in the air that the plants “breathe”. After organisms die, they decay and don’t take in more carbon 14. During the first 50,000 years after death, the carbon 14 remaining can be measured and used to tell the date when the organism died. Now, fossil fuels, the remains of plants and animals, are so old that they don’t contain carbon 14. Carbon 13 is more common in the air than in plants and is more common in the CO2 coming from volcanoes than in the modern air. We see that the rising CO2 in today’s air is rich in carbon 12 and poor in carbon 13 and carbon 14. The scarcity of carbon 13 means that the CO2 comes from plants, not from volcanoes or the CO2 dissolved in the ocean. And, the lack of carbon 14 means that the plants have been dead for a long time rendering them fossil fuels.
- The additional CO2 from fossil fuel burning and deforestation has disrupted the carbon cycle because the natural processes that restore the balance are too slow compared to the rate at which human activities are adding CO2 to the atmosphere.
- The sun provides the primary source of energy which drives the earth’s climate system but it has played very little role in the changes we’ve seen in recent decades. Direct satellite measurements since the 70s show no net increase in the sun’s output while global surface temperatures have increased. How do we prove that?
- Another indicator is stratospheric cooling which is a fingerprint of increased greenhouse, as opposed to solar warming. If the sun were to suddenly increase its output by 2%, which is about what it would take for us to see the warming that we are now, we would rightfully expect the atmosphere as well as the surface to warm up in response. However, if we were to double preindustrial levels of CO2, we would expect the surface and the lower atmosphere to warm. But, unlike the case of increasing solar influence, we would not expect the lower atmosphere to warm through at all levels. In the doubled CO2 scenario, there is a pronounced cooling of the stratosphere, and this feature is entirely absent in the solar scenario. Click – see the cooling
- Indicators of a warming world based on surface, satellite, and ocean temperature measurements. Satellites can measure energy imbalance, the difference between incoming and outgoing energy at the top of the atmosphere, and we can also see receding glaciers, sea ice, and ice sheets, rising sea level, and shifting seasons. After Raihan’s talk yesterday I wanted to add that the largest glacier in Iceland, the Vatna, has lost 10% of its mass over the last century.
- These graphs show changes in climate indicators over several decades provided by NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Each of the different colored lines in each panel represents an independently analyzed set of data. These indicators reflect the known impacts of anthropogenic, or human induced climate change of which we have very high confidence, between 99 and 100%. Those are rising temperatures and changes to precipitation.
- The climate changes naturally. Why is climate change such a concern now? The speed of warming is 10x that at the end of an ice age which ice core and geo-paeleological studies confirm are the fastest known natural sustained change on a global scale.
- The overwhelming scientific view is that anthropogenic emissions of CO2 are leading to an increasing instability of our climate. These emissions, around 240 billion tons since the start of the industrial revolution, are perturbing the natural cycles. The predictions are that these perturbations will get worse as the atmospheric concentration of CO2 rises. In my professional opinion, there is no turning back the clock; many scientists agree we’ve reached a tipping point. At this point of no return we still need to mitigate things so they don’t get worse but I think adaptation is where we should focus our efforts.
- The task science has of “getting the facts right” is still regarded as necessary but no longer as fully feasible or as sufficient to manage the interface of science and policy. It needs to be complemented with a task of exploring the relevance of deep uncertainty that limits our ability to establish objective, reliable, and valid facts
- Scientists provide knowledge needed for designing climate policy and climate management, but also represent a power factor in the struggle about other policy goals, ranging from food, travel, energy, and housing, and even general issues of life style and governance
- The facts don’t speak for themselves – we live in a world where the economy and our emotions drive most of our decisions.
- Because of these challenges, climate change communicators such as myself can’t use fear or even reason to motivate people to participate in adaptations. I like to use the solution as an approach to communicating the problem. No one likes someone coming up to them and saying “hey your house is burning down, its your fault and there’s so many things you have to do and you should feel bad about it.” The best approach is hey your house is burning down, one thing you can do is through water on it, I’ll get a bucket, don’t worry we’re in this together.”
- During my Master’s I was faced with the task of communicating climate change as the cause for increased flooding in Fernie, BC, and engaging people in solutions. The Elk River is a snowmelt-dominated river and a statistical evaluation of observed changes to the hydro-meteorological drivers of flooding (click) suggest an increase in spring precipitation as well as more rapid snowmelt. More water = more flooding.
- -Early warnings and early action saves lives: there is a need to close major gaps in communication to those most vulnerable to flooding but information doesn’t always lend to action as we’ve seen with most climate change impacts. So how could I get people to act on climate change? How could I convince them that being proactive with adaptive flood strategies would lessen their risk? I needed to investigate.
- Citizen science was my solution. OpenStreetMap is a free, editable MAP of the whole world that is being built by volunteers largely from scratch and released with an open-content license. I had already proven its success with a published, peer reviewed paper on its effectiveness on engaging people in natural hazards adaptation during the 2015 earthquakes in Nepal.
- Once my team and I created the flood layers for the city of Fernie using historical precipitation and hydrological data, as well as climate models, I had volunteers from the community go online and map their city out. I held workshops and taught people young and old how to trace map elements over satellite imagery, so they could see where their own homes would be in respect to where flooding was likely to occur.
- -When stakeholders, in this case the community, are actively involved, studies have shown they are more prone to implementing final decisions. Furthermore, in having local community members populate the map with city features including their own home, they have a personal investment in the solution. -Through citizen science I was able to connect the impacts of climate change with the solutions and it worked because instead of presenting a seemingly impossible challenge, I empowered the community with the tools to understand the context of the problem and where they fit in to the solution.
- -What if citizen science could be used to MEASURE climate change impacts? Smartphones, computers and mobile technology are enabling regular citizens to become part of a 21st century way of doing science. By observing their environments, monitoring neighborhoods, and collecting information about the world, citizen scientists are helping professional scientists to advance knowledge while speeding up new discoveries and innovations. -Its potential and challenges are explored in THE CROWD & THE CLOUD, a 4-part public television series premiering this month. I’ve been working on this project with Geoff Haines Stiles, the producer of the original COSMOS with Carl Sagan. Each episode takes viewers on a global tour of the projects and people on the front lines of this transformation in how science is done, and shows how anyone, anywhere can participate. It takes on topics like Alzheimer’s, pollution, conservation and of course climate change.
- Climate change is increasing the severity and frequency of climate-induced natural disasters. My work aims to highlight the importance of community engagement in disaster preparedness and response as well as the ability for researchers and policy makers to effectively communicate complicated science. Physical science and facts alone will not address policy and protect lives or property. Actionable, resilience based decision making must combine education, culture, politics, economics, and science.