Stories and Scenarios for a Warming Climate

Stories and Scenarios for a Warming Climate

20240427: This is an evolving, working document..

One of the best ways to think about our climate future is to think of stories that describe situations we are likely to face.  Stories are natural to humans, and they can be very powerful. In fact, they can be so powerful that some question whether it is prudent to use stories in communication and application of science-based knowledge. One reason is that stories do not have to be true, and people worry about eroding our perceptions of science with our perceptions of story.

These are not the stories of science fiction and dystopia. Nor are they stories of all that might happen if we do not manage our greenhouse gas emissions. Plenty of people write those stories.

My stories are much more mundane; they are meant to describe plausible scenarios of what we might actually expect to happen to us in the next 5, 10, 25, and 50 years.

I am convinced that stories are essential to our addressing climate change.  My reasons include that stories:

1. Make climate change real to us, local and personal,
2. Provide a way to interpret and apply simulations from computational models,
3. Provide a method to describe and manage uncertainty,
4. Help overcome fear and paralysis that are barriers to taking action.

Of course, my practical and mundane stories have to follow some rules to be usable by people. There needs to be guides to show how they can be used. The purpose of this document is to develop rules for constructing usable stories about a changing climate.

I advocate stories for answering questions on adaptation, geoengineering, and tipping points, because our existing climate model simulations are not robust enough or accurate enough to provide that information. We cannot just read some numbers out of a data file. The numbers require interpretation as well as being placed in context. This will always be true – numbers from computational models require expert interpretation. ¹Models Provide Guidance Not Predictions

This is a collection of material I have written on ways to think about our climate future. I have found these not only productive for planning, but also  useful psychologically to think about how to take some control over what is, for some, an overwhelming and frightening situation. ²Gaining agency & control

I discuss other aspects of storytelling in this short talk on YouTube called Stories of Our Climate Future.

A series of articles from my Climate Blue Column in Michigan Today

I have been working on the problems of stories and scenarios for a number of years. Aside from it being just one thing of the many things that I do, it has taken some time to evolve my thoughts and to develop the story. In 2023  the material got to the point that I started to organize it in a new way. I used my Climate Blue column to start a series of articles that are aimed to help readers think about climate change in productive ways that I think are different from the most common narratives. In a way, it is simple reframing, perhaps changing the point of view.

This section is a collection of those articles and some of the take away points. The articles provide a skeleton, perhaps, on which to build my rules and skills for stories.

1. A reader suggested that I describe a framework that mayors could use to think about climate change. It’s a good idea, so here we go.

The first entry shows how to start a path through a warming climate.

What we know best is that temperature is going up. After that, it gets complicated. If there is a lot of water around it rains harder. If there is not water, then the heat quickly dries things out.

It is conditional. Wet or dry? Above or below freezing?

It helps us to organize, understand, and explain climate change consequences if we split things into the direct, acute, effects of severe weather and the cumulative, chronic effects of warming, wetting, and drying.

Presently, weather systems behave in many ways. This will continue to be true, but there will be more energy in the system. The characteristics of weather systems must change with this additional energy.

Link to the article:

Take aways:

The most definite thing we know is that Earth’s average temperature will rise. Beyond that, there is no one thing that climate change will do. Paths are conditional, complex, but not random.

We need to consider both the instantaneous effects of weather, the intensity of storms (does it rain harder?), as well as the cumulative effects (does it rain more?) over a span of time. The cumulative effects lead to changes of the seasonal rhythm of water.

If it (drought, flood, hurricanes, etc.)  happens now, it should happen in the future; however, variability will increase.

2. This entry picks up from the previous and focuses on the importance of differentiating between the direct effect of storms versus the cumulative effects that lead to a place being wetter or drier.

Link to the article:

Take aways:

Think of a storm as a collection of those things we use to define weather: wind, temperature, and precipitation. In a warming climate any of these measures can change; hence, there are many ways storms might change. That is part of the reason there is no one thing that climate change will do.

Because storms are changing rapidly and in many ways, the standards that we have used to locate, design, and engineer our buildings are not longer correct. Today’s climate is not an accurate representation of future climate.  We need new strategies and standard to plan for the climate of the future. We don’t know how to do this, but it is something we can learn to do.

When planning for the future, we have to partition time into manageable spans.  The effects of temperature might mean that now and the next 20 years are wetter. But if it is still getting warmer in 30 to 50 years, we might shift over to dryer. That is, the effects of a warming climate might be qualitatively different in 50 years from now than in the next 20 years.

3. This entry builds on the concept of accumulating effects of heat and water. It uses wildfire as an example and considers how wetter and drier conditions contribute to decreases and increases of fire. Like climate change, there are both natural and human-caused aspects of fire.

Link to the article:

Take aways:

Using fire as an example, if it gets wetter then it likely reduces fire. If it is dryer, fire likely increases. Plus, there are ways wet-dry-wet-dry conditions can amplify fire, amplified wet spring growth followed by a dry fuel-laden summer.

How fire changes depends, largely,  on how fuel changes and how wet that fuel might be. That is, it depends on the conditions on the surface.

When looking at trends in fire, it is first worth considering trends in wetness. There are some regions of Earth where it will be persistently wetter. Others were it will be drier. So if you look at trends for the whole planet, then “average fire” could conceivably decrease if the wet areas dominate the dry areas. Of course, this is a sleight of hand that obscures fire danger. As with other measures of climate change, things are conditional. You need to look for changes in fire characteristics in fire-prone regions.

Another takeaway, there are ways to mitigate the influences of climate on fire by managing fuel. We know how to better manage fire, and actually doing that is the key to managing fire in a warming climate. For many consequences of climate change, better management of surface conditions is the way to mitigate increasing risks.

Assignment: Besides fire, what are other important effects of accumulating heat and water?

4. Surface conditions are an important part of climate story telling. If you want to think about climate change will affect you, then look at the surface around you.

Link to the article:

Take aways:

The Earth’s surface is important to climate and how it affects you.  For one, it is a boundary that is important because it provides moisture (or not) to the atmosphere. If the surface is the ocean and sea level is rising, then flooding will be increasing. If it is dry grass, it can support fire.

On the other hand, we experience the consequences of severe weather at the surface. If we pave the surface we increase runoff and flash flooding. Because of this, we can manage how climate change affects us by managing the surface.

5. This entry introduces another organizing principle, edges. When you are trying to understand what has happened and what will happen as the planet warms, looking at edges is powerful.  Edges?  An obvious one on Earth’s surface is the oceanic coastline, where sea level is rising. Another one is spring, the transition from winter to summer. Then there are some edges that are more subtle, for example, the average position of the line of freezing temperatures.

Link to the article:

Take aways:

Edges are a place of change and, often, unusual behavior. They are a place where we often first notice climate change, because edges are places where accumulated effects first become visible – a place where we isolate trends.

We make some edges ourselves; for example, the wildland-urban interface. That means that we can make climate management decisions as well; we don’t have to be climate stupid.

For edges like spring and fall, they are ragged. There has always been variability, but it is amplified with a warming climate.  An increase in variability is a near-universal outcome of climate change.

Finally, as edges move, for example the freezing line, they are places of high non-stationary, change. For example, there might first be an increase of snow and freezing rain, followed some years later by the disappearance of snow. The conditions that support a particular type of storm are also changing, for example, sea surface temperature.

Many edges appear at Earth’s surface, again drawing attention to how important it is to consider the surface in climate stories and scenarios.

6: Stormy weather – Presently, weather systems behave in many ways. This will continue to be true, but there will be more energy in the system. The characteristics of weather systems must change, because you can’t add energy to something and expect it to stay the same.

Link to the article:

Take aways:

Storms have a job. They redistribute heat to smooth out regions of high and low heat – regions of hot and cold.

I propose thinking about storms as a collection of temperature, water, and wind. It does not really matter whether it is a winter storm, a hurricane, or a tornado. Storms, currently, mix together their ingredients in many ways. That will remain true in the future.

We get all wrapped up in arguments about hurricanes being more “intense,” for example, when there are many ways hurricanes might change. ³Hurricane Dorian and the Bahama Islands

The most definitive way storms will change is conditioned on the availability of water. When there is water, it will rain (snow) harder, and it is likely there will be more rain (snow).

Storms are what we think about as causing instantaneous damage. Their damage depends on their interactions with what is on the surface.

7: Do you think that weather is random, chaotic?  I do not. This entry is on how geography and the physical characteristics of Earth organize weather.

Link to the article:

Sometimes we hear that weather is chaotic. Some take that idea and extend it to weather cannot predicted beyond a certain time limit. Then they take that to climate cannot be predicted at all. There are numerous scientific and logical flaws in that argument, but that is not the subject here.

Chaos in this case refers to a fluid system jumping from one state to the next in an unpredictable way. It is, really, a mathematical concept that follows from highly simplified equations. We find some cases where chaos theory is useful, but that does not lead to the weather is “chaotic.”

In this entry I write about the principles that organize our weather. These include:

• • • The seasonal cycle of the Sun that heats the tropics more than the poles
    • The rotation of Earth
    • The location of mountains
    • Contrast between continents and oceans

Because of all of these things, storms form in preferential places and many move along specific pathways. It is often more useful for planning to think about how pathways are changing rather than how individual storms are changing.

An Outline for Organizing a Guidebook (Even more of a work in progress)

1. Rules for Writing Stories
   1. Rule of Complexity (There is no one thing global warming will do, no single outcome.)
   2. Rule of Change (Nonstationarity. What is true in the next 30 years may not be true in the following 30 years. We are not making a transition from an old climate to a new one; a new climate is far in the future.)
   3. Rule of Continuity (If it happens now, then expect it to happen in the future.)
   4. Rule of Conditions (Outcomes that appear contradictory, drought and flood, are not. They are conditional to the background, to the surface.)
      1. Wet or dry?
      2. Above or below freezing?
      3. Instantaneous or cumulative?
      4. Consequences of climate change depend on conditions on the surface
         1. Natural environment
         2. Built environment
   5. Rule of Edges (Link to Surface. Link to Conditions, Stormtracks)
   6. Rule of Physics (Weather will continue to obey the laws of physics, which will not change with a warming climate.)
2. Points to Incorporate
   1. Weather is how we feel climate.
   2. Temperature is directional. Extreme precipitation follows directly from temperature and water availability. Every thing else is conditoinal.
   3. Variability will increase.
   4. If there are disruptions, then recovery will be in a new climate – a new background.
   5. Non-local disruptions (e.g., migration, smoke, )
3. Response
   1. There are existing techniques and resources to address environmental problems.
   2. Managing consequences of a warming climate, flood, fire, drought, in many cases is managing how we prepare for and respond to weather-related damage. We need to manage the surface. (Role of research.)