• Number 308  |
• March 29, 2010

A better look at the big picture of future climate scenarios

Until now, climate change scenarios were developed and applied sequentially. The scenarios began with societal and economic factors that influence greenhouse gas emissions, then atmospheric processes, and finally impacts. So, an international team of scientists including researchers from DOE’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory worked together to devise a new parallel approach for creating and using scenarios. The approach more tightly links scientific models and studies of greenhouse gas emissions, climate projections, impacts of climate change, and human decisions. The approach shortens the time between the development of emissions scenarios and the use of the resulting climate scenarios, which are extremely important in determining the technical, policy, and economic requirements for reaching whatever society decides is a safe level of climate change. This research, which recently appeared in Nature, was led by Richard Moss, at PNNL's Joint Global Change Research Institute.

[Kristin Manke, 509.372.6011,
kristin.manke@pnl.gov]