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Story of the month ...

February 2011: Would you stay on an airplane, where the pilots only get one third of the essential information? Early in February I was in a meeting in Geneva, Switzerland, discussing Earth observation support for the next assessment of our knowledge on climate change by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). We were considering the Essential Climate Variables, (ECV), which had been accepted in the United Nations Framework Convention for Climate Change (UNFCCC), when one participant, who was involved in the group that develop the set of ECV, reported that the group initially had ended up with 90 ECV, but out of fear that the governments would not accept such a large number of variables to be observed continuously had decided to reduce the number to some 30 ECV.

I was shocked. Can you imaging that we would build an airplane and decided, for economic reasons, only to include instruments for about one third of the essential variables in the cockpit and thus keep two third of the essential information from the pilots? How can we expect that they will be able to steer the plane through all imaginable conditions? Would you want to be on airplane if you new that the pilots are basically uninformed about essential states and trends on the plane?

Unfortunately, we cannot leave spaceship Earth and have to live with uninformed pilots. But I have to ask what ethical basis a scientist has, who knows that 60 variables are essential in order to monitor, detect, and understand climate change and to plan mitigation and adaptation and chooses not to inform the decision makers about these ECVs in order to get at least 30 other ECVs accepted. In final consequence, this scientist is responsible for the many people who might be killed because mitigation and adaptation was not timely and sufficient. Making a different choice and informing the decision makers about the full set of the 90 ECVs may not have led to the decision makers providing the resources for monitoring these ECVs, but the responsibility would have been with them. Now it is with the scientist, who chose not to give the full picture to the decision makers and society. Shame on him.


If you have a story, thought, or picture worth to be considered as story, thought or picture of the month, please feel free to inform me about it by sending an e-mail to hpplag@unr.edu.