280

climatologists for a new

climatology
New

A.H.

Perry

University of Wales at Swansea, Singleton Park, Swansea,

SA2 8PP

Changing climatology

When the Value of the weather was published (Maunder, 1970), the author commented that
it was rare for meteorologists to meet up with and talk to economists, sociologists and
planners. By the time of the 1986 successor volume (Maunder, 1986) it was noted in the
preface that the ... non-scientific aspects [of the weather] are still neglected by many
climatologists ... and the economic, social, political, planning and legal aspects still need
to be very much emphasised. (p. xxiii) Since then there have been signs of a major change.
The socioeconomic impacts of greenhouse warming are regularly considered in texts on
environmental issues in international relations (e.g., Thomas, 1992). Cynics might even
observe that climatology seems to have become too important to leave to the climatologist
to study. With hindsight it can be argued that the broadening of the scope of the subject
was inevitable once a consensus existed that rapid change of climate as a result of
anthropogenic activities was very likely.
Mather et al. (1980) grasped this new promise for the subject when they noted than
the threat of short-term dire consequences has elevated climatic change study to
unparalleled heights in the history of climatology. By the 1970s climatology moved to the
forefront as a significant scientific discipline and climate was viewed as a major destabilizing force on world economies. (p. 286) At that time there was great uncertainty as to the
future course of climate. A number of well publicized extremes in the early 1970s,
including the early years of the calamitous Sahelian drought, led to the suggestion in some
quarters (Hare, 1977) that the climate was becoming more variable. Other climatologists
argued that the anomalies might be the beginnings of a new ice age. While it might seem
quite bizarre that less than 20 years ago some climatologists were pointing to the downturn
of mean temperatures between 1940 and 1965 in high northern latitudes as the precursor
of cooling, older, experienced researchers like Hare were noting that ...climate is
exasperatingly variable and made up of signal not noise, and sooner or later we shall learn
to amplify that signal: In the meantime planners should listen more acutely to the
climatologists and the latter should learn some economics. (p. 29) Many climatologists
would argue these words are as true today as they were in 1977.
A widespread belief in the reality of impending climate change has clearly been the most
influential factor elevating the study of climate and its impacts on natural and socio-

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economic systems to a new level of interest. The complex of underlying interactions,

feedbacks and internal dependencies that make up the matrix of impacts is still not well
understood and demands the close co-operation between physical and social scientists. By
1990 Hosler was writing in a discussion on the education and training in the use of
meteorology in human affairs that ... meteorologists must place at the top of the list of
their reasons for their existence as being to increase their contribution to the productivity
of national economies and to minimize weather-related losses of life and property.

(p. 110)

complete climatologist of the future is an individual who not only has had a
thorough grounding in atmospheric science studies but is also conversant in the social
sciences, this has major implications for the training and perhaps the background of the
new generation of climatologists. A number of possible scenarios suggest themselves:
If the

Climatologists will need a much broader training than has been the case hitherto.
They will need a greater understanding of the methodology and principles of the social
sciences while retaining training in the atmospheric sciences. Already courses in
atmospheric management and applied climatology are seeking to develop this wider
viewpoint.
2) There will be an increasing requirement for social scientists with environmental
interests to take climatology courses and to become climatologically aware and
develop a general weather and climate literacy.
1)

broadening of training and opening up of the subject to a wider church

opportunity for the geographer climatologist. In higher education there can be
presents
to
expected be implications for both teaching and research. In traditional degree structures
with option courses, there are already signs that student uptake on climate courses is
increasing. Academic frameworks are needed which allow students to mix and match more
easily across the spectrum of the subject with fewer prerequisites, and for climate courses
to be on offer and accessible for human as well as physical geographers. The challenge is
going to be to retain and continue to satisfy the needs of the specialist while enhancing the
attractiveness of courses to other geographers and to nongeographers.
At many USA colleges and universities experiments are being conducted in teaching the
basics of atmospheric science in the context of related societal issues or concerns (Moran,
1991). Themes, such as weather and food productivity and energy resource utilization,
are often chosen on courses where the emphasis is on the links among science, technology
and society. Ulanski (1993) has recently given details of meteorological courses in the
context of liberal arts degrees and it is from such initiatives that newly focused courses will
develop. A boost to the field of applied climatology has come in 1994 from the launch by
the Royal Meteorological Society of a new journal - Meteorological Applications. Among
other aims the journal wants to open up the views of the private and public sectors of
meteorological activity and allow interaction and collaboration between a wide range of
specialists in different fields who use meteorological data. A wide discussion of the means
and methods of educating and training applied climatologists needs to be initiated and, if
the foregoing remarks help to stimulate such a debate, the author will be well pleased.
Both this
an

Meanwhile let

us turn our

attention

to some

of the research output of the last year.

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282

II1

New

impact studies

..

developing research area in climate impact studies is vulnerability to hunger, where the
vulnerability is an aggregate measure of the factors that influence exposure to
hunger and predisposition to its consequences. The focal definition draws on concepts in
epidemiology, economics and hazard-risk mapping, since hunger is related to a variety of
environmental social and economic factors. As such it affords an illustration of points
made earlier in this article. A global study and five country studies (Zimbabwe, Kenya,
Senegal, Egypt and Chile) have been undertaken (Downing, 1993; Parry and Rosenzweig,
1994) and a NATO research workshop was held at Oxford in 1993 (Fischer et al., 1994).
One of the main conclusions is that climate change could increase the disparities in cereal
production between developed and developing countries and the population at risk of
hunger in the latter countries could increase.
A wider perspective on the determinants of vulnerability has been presented by
Magalhaes (1992) and because they deserve a wider appreciation they have been
reproduced in Table 1). The opposite of vulnerability in climate impact terms might be
said to be resilience, a term that might be applied to regions or countries having the
capacity to bounce back and recover (Burton, 1992). Resilience requires flexibility and
adaptability which means accumulated wealth and economic well-being together with,
ideally, a healthy population with a young demographic structure and a strong, highly
developed infrastructure. The impacts of a climate change on environment and society are
determined as much, if not more, by the characteristics of the regions and peoples affected
as by the nature of the climate change itself.
The year 1993 saw the publication of the first two books in a projected series that will
examine future climatic change in each of the main regional sea areas (Jeftic et al., 1993;
A

term

Maul, 1993). From the evidence of the Mediterranean and intra-Americas

Table 1

Characteristics that determine the

vulnerability of a region

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sea

volumes,

283

the format will include overviews of each area together with case studies of specific
localities. Both environmental and societal impacts are discussed and again we have
evidence of physical and social scientists working together, in this case under the auspices
of the United Nations Environment Programme. Regional impact studies have been
hampered by the lack of confidence in the prediction of the detail of regional changes of
climate. Region-specific climate data is needed to assess impacts and develop regional
response strategies and, despite the imprecision of the climate model output, these two
major regional impact studies suggest that important and useful analysis is possible at the
regional scale. The concept of critical environmental regions is beginning to emerge
(Almendares et al., 1993; Kasperson et al., 1994) as the spotlight turns on regions
especially vulnerable to climate instability.
Researchers looking at climate impacts on the natural world not surprisingly find that
recent apparent analogues of future climatic conditions provide irresistible research
opportunities. In the UK and much of northwest Europe a remarkable climatic episode of
above-average temperatures and, in many places, below normal rainfall occurred from
1988 to 1990 (Brugge, 1992). Two successive mild winters and hot summers were thought
by the Department of the Environment to be of significance ecologically and in a report
(Cannel and Pitcairn, 1993) they have collated as much information as possible on the
impacts of the event on the natural environment. Among the conclusions the authors
highlight was an increase in the abundance, activity and geographic spread of many
insects, some of which were pests like aphids.
Nuisance blooms of algae accompanied higher-than-average freshwater temperatures on
many lakes and rivers. Whether these observations give a foretaste of things to come
remains, of course, a tantalizing question. It was partly as a result of the 1988-92 drought
in southeast England that the National Rivers Authority (1992) has been examining the
sensitivity to climate change of the water industry with a view to developing a strategy for
responding to potential changes in climate. Climate change could change the reliability of
river flows, the risk of fluvial flooding and groundwater recharge (Amell, 1992) as well as
change the characteristics of coastal ecosystems and increase the risk of coastal flooding.
Wisely the NRA has considered adopting a no regrets policy towards climate change,
where any action taken should be assessed on two criteria: first, that it will not make it
more difficult to respond to climate change at a later date and, secondly, that it will not
increase vulnerability to change.
It was the extremely hot weather in August 1990 and the associated record amounts of
low-level ozone that gives added interest to the publication last year of a survey of urban air
quality in the UK (Department of the Environment, 1993). While future trends in urban
air quality will depend very strongly on trends in road-traffic emissions, any tendency for
more frequent or prolonged summer heatwaves will exacerbate a situation that is already
worrying and which has considerable health implications for the four in every five people in
the UK who live in urban areas.
Late in 1993 The Lancet commissioned a series of articles under the general heading of
Health and climate change. Heat-related mortality was examined by Kalkstein (1993)
while Luevinsohn (1994) found that small increases in temperature could have substantial
epidemiological efforts depending on how they are distributed.
As the foregoing review illustrates, climate-change impact research continues to
proliferate. The last few years have shown that researchers are using more sophisticated
and complex methodologies to evaluate impacts and develop informed decision-making
strategies (Parry, 1993). Increasingly, attention is being redirected from global-scale

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sceneries to predictions of potential effects on individual nations, regions and

industries. During the last year one of the most comprehensive impact study has come for
the USA (OTA, 1993). This study focused on areas where future costs may be very high,
impacts may be irreversible and the validity of long-term decisions made today will be
important. More than 100 areas requiring policy decisions were identified under themes
such as geographical and institutional fragmentation, inadequate communication of
climate risk and lack of contingency planning to prepare for extreme events. It is
encouraging to note that in the face of continued uncertainty about both future climate
and its impacts the understandable reaction to do nothing either because of the uncertainty
or because of the feeling that change will happen well into the future has not taken root.
Goudie (1993) has recently commented on the uncertainty, pointing out that... there are
almost certainly mechanisms of climate change which we do not yet suspect or which we
cannot qualify to an adequate level. Some of these might accentuate the greenhouse effect,
while others might serve to counter it. (p. 138)

doomsday

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