Overview

Strengthen citizen-science initiatives on climate change so as to build greater public engagement with the conduct of climate change science.

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Recent posts

    Objectives

    • Closer engagement. This should produce closer engagement between scientists and society, not just in terms of disseminating scientific results and broadening input into the research agenda, but specifically by engaging the public in the research process itself. This initiative should begin by assembling and synthesizing the results of the many citizen climate change efforts now underway. It should then encourage scientists to collaborate on developing best practices guidance or another quality control mechanism for citizen science, so that these efforts are considered scientifically (and not just politically) legitimate.
    • Technical example of citizen-science: distributed computing. Members of the general public have been contributing the idle processing capacity of their personal computers – through the Internet – to a massive set of distributed computing experiments organized at www.climateprediction.net. These experiments require consent by the users and afford them a sense of involvement in the projects, as well as access to the findings. The scientists, meanwhile, gain access to much more computing power than they would otherwise be able to harness. This innovative work has produced genuinely important – and, in some cases, troubling – findings. In a study published by Oxford climate modeler David Stainforth in the January 27, 2005 issue of the scientific journal Nature, a model that ran on 26,000 idle computers found that six so called “perturbed parameters” could interact in a non-linear fashion to produce higher climate sensitivity to greenhouse gases than had been found in any previous study – up to 19.8° Fahrenheit (or 3.6° higher than any previous study). This is not to say this high sensitivity is likely (they were silent on probability), but such models help to establish a range that extends out to the worst case.
    • Non-technical example of citizen-science: bird counts. A leading non-technical example of citizen-science to build on is the Audubon Society’s Christmas Bird Count database, for which 106 years of records submitted largely by amateur birdwatchers have been captured – and are now computerized. Public participation has increased steadily over the years.
      Over the past 40 years, there have been 1,000 to 2,000 Christmas Bird Counts per year with up to 200 species per location. Numbers of each species are counted, so there is good information on changes in abundance, not just presence versus absence. Many birds are considered “charismatic species,” and as such their familiarity to many Americans makes them ideal for communicating the effects of climate change.
      In fact, the Audubon data from the mid-1960s shows that many species of birds are wintering farther north, providing additional evidence that the warming at northerly latitudes is influencing the behavior of species in relation to their habitats.
      The Audubon data is robust, representing a wide variety of species with many ecological niches. Audubon researchers are now aiming to undertake a verification of the finding about
      northern range extensions by analyzing all the species on the Christmas Bird Count over the 40 year period (about 400-450 species with sufficient sample sizes). They will also undertake selective lookbacks earlier in the century for key indicator and representative species.

    Related Initiatives

    • ClimatePrediction.net
      The largest experiment to try and produce a forecast of the climate in the 21st century. It is a collaborative program between Oxford University, the Hadley Centre at the UK Met Office, the Open University and others. The model is run by harnessing desktop computers around the world. To participate in the model using your own desktop computer click on the link.
    • The Audoban Society’s Citizen Science Initiatives
      This effort includes the Christmas Bird Count with a database that now contains more than a century of data on early-winter bird populations across the Americas, the Great Backyard Birdcount, which takes place annualy on Presidents’ Day Weekend, giving an opportunity for members of the public to count birds in their backyard and beyond, and ebird, a partnership between Audoban and Cornell to present a website that provides birdwatchers a way for to save sightings to an online database.
    • Academy of Science and Technology Centers: IGLO – International Action on Global Warming
      An initiative of the Association of Science and Technology Centers, a coalition of science museums and science centers around the world. IGLO’s goal is to raise public awareness about the impact of global warming. “IGLO is designed to raise worldwide public awareness about global warming and the particular ways that the Polar Regions profoundly influence the Earth’s climate, environments, ecosystems, and human society.”

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