Vicky Slonosky: The Long History of Changing the Climate

The Long History of Changing the Climate

Part 1

Vicky Slonosky

Like many others before me, I’ve gone from being interested in the content of historical climate records for scientific analysis to also being fascinated by their context, and by the history of the idea of anthropogenic climate change found in these documents. The idea of humans changing the climate seems to have been around for a long time in the New World.  Actually, the idea of humans changing the climate seems to have been around for a long time, period. Clarence Glacken traced the idea of human-induced climate change back Classical Antiquity, to shortly after Aristotle.  The idea of humans changing the climate by modifying the environment winds its way through Roman historians, medieval monks, Enlightenment philosophers, and 19th century meteorologists.

Part I: BACC - The BALTEX Assessment of Climate Change in the Baltic Sea Basin

The BALTEX Assessment of Climate Change in the Baltic Sea Basin is an effort to determine the state of knowledge about climate, climate change and climate impact in  the Baltic Sea catchment. Its process follows the IPCC to some extent, with an international sterring committee, a list auf lead authors, and an independent review process. The first report came out in 2008 - named BACC-1; now, a second report BACC-2 is in its finishing phase. All lead authors of BACC-2 are new, while some of the lead authors of BACC-1 have become members of the steering committee.

"Statistically significant scenarios"

Sometimes, scenarios of possible future climate change are examined if they would represent a "statistically significant" change from present conditions. Usage of this terminology is misleading, and valid only in a very restricted sense - because of the sampling assumptions needed for employing the machinery of statistical hypothesis testing.
This issue is discussed in the paper  "Testing ensembles of climate change scenarios for"statistical significance"by Hans von Storch and Francis W. Zwiers, which has been accepted for publication by "Climatic Change".