Written by Three weeks ago, YESS was present at the yearly meeting of the German Climate Consortium (DKK) in Berlin. The DKK represents the leading players of German climate and climate impact research encompassing more than 20 renowned research organizations. With “500 days after Paris”, the meeting focused on achievements and challenges of climate science after COP 21. In specific, the participants discussed three main topics: observational evidence for climate change, climate change communication among scientists, politicians and society, and challenges of climate science to support the transition towards a greenhouse gas-neutral world.
Discussions of the three topics gave valuable insights into current challenges in both science and communication. For observations over Germany, higher resolved radar networks are planned in key regions to improve our understanding of long-term precipitation changes, particularly with respect to occurring extreme precipitation events. For global as well as regional modeling, main challenges lie in the resolution of clouds and precipitation at small scales in order to project their changes into the future. Generally, a better understanding of tipping points such as melting glaciers needs to be accomplished in order to understand and predict sudden climatic changes on time scales ranging from decades to multi-millennia.
Science plays a crucial role in solving societal problems. Therefore, scientific results need to be communicated in a comprehensible way. In that respect, social networks and emerging news platforms need to be used to provide reliable science-based information to the society and stakeholders. By that, a constant dialogue can be established that is crucial to connect scientists with politicians, economists and society. The following conference on climate communication will discuss these topics more in detail: K³ in Salzburg on 25 and 26 September 2017 (German only).
The meeting provided great insights into recent challenges of climate sciences. We thank the DKK for the opportunity to attend the meeting and for their financial support of the YESS webpage.
Jörg Burdanowitz for YESS