date: Wed, 4 Jun 2008 09:50:40 +0100 from: "Nigel Arnell" subject: QUEST-GSI and the Committee on Climate Change to: "Tim Wheeler" , "Tim Osborn" , "Terry Dawson" , "Pete Smith" , "Robert Nicholls" , "Sari Kovats" , , "Betts, Richard" , "Richard Harding" , "Richard Taylor" , "Maria Noguer" , , "Jo House" , "Evan Fraser" Dear all, As you may be aware the Committee on Climate Change ([1]http://www.defra.gov.uk/environment/climatechange/uk/legislation/committee/index.htm#ro le) is charged with reviewing the government's 60% target for greenhouse gas emissions reductions. Central to this, of course, is an assessment of the impacts of different rates of climate change, and a key early task of the Committee is to review the evidence for impacts under different rates of climate change. This is a great opportunity for QUEST-GSI.....but unfortunately a bit early, because the first CCC report has to appear this autumn. Some of you are coming to a meeting in London next week (agenda attached for all for information), where we will have the opportunity to discuss issues with the CCC: I've already had a preliminary meeting. The CCC are still uncertain about issues such as which baseline socio-economic scenario to use, and there is great scope for us to help set their agenda. It would be extremely good if we could get some preliminary information in to the report, and provide more "definitive" projections of impacts under defined temperature changes for a likely "second edition" in 2009. How feasible would it be for your group to come up with first-approximation damage functions (showing impacts as a function of temperature) over the summer, for at least the priority subset of climate changes currently being produced by Tim Osborn? In the next few days I hope to circulate "final" "definitive" global socio-economic projections for population and GDP (I've got permission from IMAGE to use their latest IMAGE 2.3 population and GDP projections, which makes us nicely consistent with the other IMAGE data we are using and other initiatives such as the ADAM project).I can also circulate pre-preliminary examples of the sorts of things we should be producing, using some old climate scenarios with the new socio-economic characterisations. There is a possibility of some small top-up funds next year from the CCC to tailor outputs to particular CCC requirements....but this won't be clear for a while. It is quite likely that the CCC will get some climate stabilisation runs from the Hadley Centre, under certain emissions assumptions (using the simple Hadley Centre climate model, not the full GCM). There will probably be an opportunity for us to estimate impacts under these temperature pathways... Regards Nigel Professor Nigel Arnell Director Walker Institute for Climate System Research University of Reading Earley Gate Reading RG6 6BB UK +44-118-378-7392 [2]www.walker-institute.ac.uk Attachment Converted: "C:\Documents and Settings\Tim Osborn\My Documents\Eudora\Attach\CCCWorkshop_LTT_Impacts_Final.doc"