Last week in Italy, we have been discussing future climate change scenarios for the next IPCC AR5 report. The big centers in Europe, Japan and the US are integrating their climate models and this data will be used for driving regional climate models for Africa (CORDEX-AFRICA). For a computer power point of view, this reminds me a G-8 Summit with African nations involved in the policy making. These centers are running climate models on 100, 200, 1000, 64,000 processors and generating tremendous amounts of data. There are several things that have emerged from this workshop:
Overall recommendations
1.) Don't use a singular realization (1 climate model projection) for understanding climate change
2.) Use ensemble averages for understanding climate change.
3.) Data from GCMs will be available soon for folks to begin running regional models.
BUT, NOT SO FAST MY FRIEND
Ensembles were used in the last IPCC report for Africa showed that there was great uncertainty about future changes over most of the continent. Why??? Because the global models have their own signals of dry and wet patterns that when averaged gives So what will be different now???
There will be no difference unless you bring in the local and regional expertise from Africa. They want to be involved but will they???? The problem is that this is just another exercise for the average scientists who will write grants and publish papers. Guess what? This is what has happened before with no real breakthroughs occurring and limited capacity building.
So I say that the big difference maker for the next IPCC report it relates to Africa will be quality. Quality will emerge from having African scientist who understand the needs of the people in their regions and countries. They know what is important in this process for farmers, the powergrid, water resources, food security and urbanization. Life is not static and cannot be viewed only from the outside.
Let make a change for once.
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