Global climate models developed by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predict glacial retreat, rises in sea level, and other impacts on human and natural activity, from agriculture to migratory patterns. RAND researchers have studied and are continuing to examine the effects of climate change, particularly how governments and businesses respond to both observed changes and projected scenarios.
Reducing greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) is an important social goal to mitigate climate change. A common mitigation paradigm is to consider strategy "wedges" that can be applied to different activities to achieve desired GHG reductions.
This paper uses a combinatorial approach in which scenarios are created for all combinations of the technology development assumptions that underlie a smaller, representative set of scenarios.
The authors present the concept of robust decision making (RDM), which draws on already-existing knowledge of practitioners to choose actions that are viable in both the short- and long-term.
This paper describes work helping the Inland Empire Utilities Agency (IEUA) explicitly develop adaptive policies to respond to climate change and integrating these policies into the organizations' long-range planning processes.
This article provides a concise overview of methods for analyzing policy choices that have been used in the study of long-term environmental challenges.
Many scientists have called for a substantial new investment in climate modeling to increase the accuracy, precision, and reliability of climate predictions. Such investments are often justified by asserting that failure to improve predictions will prevent society from adapting successfully to changing climate.
This article discusses research into policies to manage greenhouse gases in the U.S. Debates in the U.S. Congress regarding the distribution of economic impacts associated with different mechanisms designed to encourage the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions are considered.
Scenarios play a prominent role in policy debates over climate change, but questions continue about how best to use them. A new analytic method, based on robust decisionmaking, can be applied to water resource management in California and climate change policy questions.
Integrated assessment modeling of global climate change has focused primarily on gradually occurring changes in the climate system. However, atmospheric and earth scientists have become increasingly concerned that the climate system may be subject to abrupt, discontinuous changes on short time scales, and that anthropogenic greenhouse-gas emissions could trigger such shifts.
The authors have developed an alternative framework focused on flexibility--finding, testing and implementing policies that work well no matter what happens.
In this chapter the authors argue for a different approach to climate-change policy and thus a different use for forecasts. They argue that climate change presents a problem of decision-making under conditions of deep uncertainty. In the face of this uncertainty, robust strategies are ones that will work reasonably well no matter what the future holds.
The United States and European Union have reached an impasse over climate change, which threatens both transatlantic relations and the Earth's environment.
Decision-makers need to develop a climate policy acceptable to groups with many different estimates of the likelihood of alternative futures, and may tend to rely on strategies that work reasonably well instead of alternatives across a wide range of plausible scenarios. The authors agreed with a recommendation for use of ensembles of multiple scenarios to capture what is known about the long-term climate future.
The authors reply to comments made by J. M. Malville on the movement of geomagneticall trapped radiation toward lower latitudes on the night side of the earth in relation to observed dumping of auroral particles near magnetic midnight.
Upper air densities obtained by means of rockets and satellites in the region from 100 to about 800 km are presented.
Solar stream distortion of the geomagnetic field, polar auroras, electrojets.
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