The World Climate Research Programme (WCRP) facilitates the analysis and prediction of many aspects of Earth system change. Our Programme covers complex research questions, many with immediate relevance to understanding and predicting human impact on climate. The WCRP ‘Grand Science Challenges’ convey and address daunting research questions that confront the climate research community. However, faced with a planet that shows increasing signs of rapid change, have we missed something among our science priorities? Do we address our priorities in a coordinated and efficient manner? Do we share and can we convey a compelling overall vision?
To address these questions WCRP convened an ‘Out of the Box’ workshop in June 2016 at the International Council for Science in Paris. We invited a small group of leading researchers, selected to acheive disciplinary, age and gender balance but also to represent the broad range of WCRP topics and activities. In their ‘out of the box’ mode we asked them to set acronyms aside, to look across and beyond present WCRP and Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) structures and processes, and to assess future directions and needs in climate science.
In a thoughtful and well-written opinion, now published in Nature Climate Change, that group recommends that, in light of climate targets emerging from the UNFCCC CoP21 negotiations in Paris, climate science needs to “sharpen its view”. They suggest three apparently simple but scientifically rich fundamental questions to guide current and future climate research:
1. Where does the carbon go?
2. How does the weather change with climate?
3. How does climate influence the habitability of the Earth and its regions?
Their article puts these questions into larger scientific and social context, elaborates on the complexities within each question and on connections among the questions, and finishes with serious recommendations for how we go about our work. We believe that these questions and recommendations represent the type of strong, compelling and inclusive messages that can help convey the importance of WCRP's work on critical and urgent climate issues.
For more see the article 'Climate research must sharpen its view' in Nature Climate Change.
Additional links:
Urgencies in Fundamental Climate Research following the Paris Agreement - Discussion at the 22nd Conference of the Parties about science questions identified at WCRP's 'Out of the Box' workshop at the International Council for Science in Paris, June 2016.