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By Eric
Roston
Tens of thousands
of the world's top experts on hurricanes,
drought, heat and volcanoes descended on New
Orleans for a weeklong conference.
A day into the
meeting, they found themselves reeling over a
disaster none of them saw coming: The Trump
administration’s plan to shutter one
of the world’s most significant climate research
facilities. Doing so would be equivalent to
pulling the engine out of a car hurtling down
the highway, judging by scientists’ reactions.
Despite being under
a cloud, though, attendees of the annual
American Geophysical Union conference had work
to do. After all, thousands of scheduled talks
weren't going to give themselves.
Over the week, five
key themes emerged, showing how rapidly climate
science is shifting in response to worsening
weather, the Trump administration and the rapid
rise of artificial intelligence. Here are the
takeaways.
A
meteorologist monitors weather activity. Photographer:
Michael A. McCoy/Bloomberg
Artificial
Intelligence
Machine learning
techniques have helped scientists translate
their global models into regional impacts for at
least 15 years. But advances in computing have
further improved their ability to model the
future — albeit still imperfect — including how society responds
to disaster.
University of
Illinois researchers studying July’s
catastrophic floods in Texas found that
large-language models they used to simulate
officials’ responses to weather warnings were
"consistent with the real-world handling of this
crisis." That can help improve decision-making
in the face of the next flood.
Meanwhile, a team
at Brigham Young University is trying to train
large-language models to translate a national
river model into real-time, actionable consumer
hydrological data. Their goal, professor Dan
Ames said in a talk, is to turn a hard-to-access
model “into conversations on your iPhone.”
Geoengineering
Dimming the sun to
cool the planet has
long been a fringe idea. But this year’s AGU
featured dozens of talks and posters covering
the once-taboo topic. The consensus: much more
research is needed.
Douglas MacMartin,
a professor of engineering at Cornell
University, walked his audience through some of
the many tough questions about artificially
lowering the temperature, including how to
answer some of them with small-scale
experiments.
Other talks focused
on the knock-on effects of putting cooling
particles in the atmosphere, relying on volcanic
eruptions as a stand-in for human intervention
— a relatively new area of study with few
answers so far. But areas where more research
has been done have yielded some harrowing
answers. If the world startsgeoengineering and
then stops, it has the potential to double the
impact of rising temperatures, according to
Anthony Harding of the Georgia Institute of
Technology.
Adaptation
The arrival of
climate change’s impacts has added urgency to
adaptation, and the geoscientists are on it. The
diverse impacts of everything from heat to
floods mean that all manner of researchers have
a role to play in preparing communities living
in at-risk areas.
Winslow Hansen of
the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies, for
example, shared findings that roughly 94 million
acres of the US West are overdue for wildfire
because of decades of fire-suppression policy.
That type of information can allow fire agencies
to use prescribed fire to thin forests most at
risk and policymakers to implement rules to
protect communities.
Attribution
Scientists are
pushing the boundaries of estimating the role
greenhouse gas pollution plays in altering
extreme weather. A talk on 2021’s Hurricane Ida
found that while the storm was once a
one-in-8,000-year event, it’s now a 2,000-year
event and, thanks to continued greenhouse gas
pollution, it has a 50% chance of happening
again in the next 50 years. This type of
forward-looking attribution can also be a tool
for adaptation planners.
NCAR’s
fate
Disassembling NCAR
is the latest assault on science
by the Trump administration. Some researchers at
AGU were ready to fight. About 7,000 people made
calls between Wednesday night and Thursday
afternoon, or sent letters to their members of
Congress urging them to protect NCAR, said
Antonio Busalacchi, the president of the
consortium that runs the center.
But some saw NCAR’s
dismantling as a reason to leave the US. Space
physicist Alexandros Chasapis is planning to
move back to France to continue his research.
“The fact that this
is on the table on its own is causing damage,”
he said of closing NCAR. “Even if they walk this
back tomorrow, you lose trust.”
What was clear to
countless researchers at AGU is the scientific
value of NCAR. "Every scientist has benefited in
some way from what NCAR does," said Marc Alessi,
a science fellow at the nonprofit Union of
Concerned Scientists.
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