MCLEAN, Va.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--A new article in the journal Climatic Change, co-authored by one of LMI’s foremost environmental scientists, calls on the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to improve its guidance for reporting climate change findings in the areas of understanding, certainty and/or confidence, calling the current system lacking in its treatment of uncertainty. The research supporting the article leans heavily on the Climate Change Knowledge Engine® (LMI-CliCKE®), a groundbreaking tool for easing access to climate change findings.
The invited article, “Improving Conveyance of Uncertainties in the Findings of the IPCC,” was authored by LMI Senior Consultant Rachael Jonassen, and Roger Pielke, Jr., of the Center for Science and Technology Policy Research, University of Colorado/CIRES.
The authors argue that despite best efforts in IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) to reach a common language that will make the report more accessible to decision makers, “(to) fully incorporate the implications of uncertainties in findings, IPCC must specify how to combine uncertainty metrics at each stage of the synthesis process and move to a system of independent tracking of findings and their attendant uncertainties during the writing process. The method of representing uncertainty should be robust enough to encompass all findings.” The article recommends that future IPCC databases should include all findings from all reports and link findings across reports to show the evolution of knowledge and certainties.
The groundbreaking LMI-CliCKE® (pronounced “click”) tool combines open-source semantic web technology and data from the public domain in a way that is accessible to nonscientific leaders in the public and private sectors.
LMI-CliCKE® is free to use and available to the public now at http://clicke.lmi.org. It was funded independently by the LMI Research Institute, which not only supported the development of the CliCKE database, but also the underlying research and preparation of the article manuscript.
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