Less CO2 Means More Money for Recreational Coldwater Fisheries

Coldwater fishes, including salmon and steelhead, have enormous cultural and economic importance to communities in the Pacific Northwest. On top of the current challenges facing these species, climate change likely will complicate their survival further as summer stream flows decrease and stream temperatures increase. Diana Lane and colleagues estimate the economic impact of climate change…

Summaries for Policymakers Provide Guidance for Action

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) just released the summaries for policymakers for the reports by Working Groups 2 and 3. They are highlighted below. (Last fall’s report from Working Group 1 was highlighted in the March 2014 issue of the CIRCulator.) Impacts, Adaptation, and VulnerabilityWorking Group 2 has created a practical “guide to action,” evaluating current…

Powerful New Tools Boost Decadal Climate Prediction

A new approach to climate simulation is showing great promise for predicting future changes in temperature and precipitation across western North America. A set of experiments has compared observed oceanic and atmospheric evolution against the results of two types of climate simulation: “initialized” and “uninitialized” simulations, according to Gerald Meehl and colleagues. Initialized simulations specify…

Susan Capalbo: The Economics of Climate Change

Professor Susan Capalbo, who heads OSU’s Department of Applied Economics, researches a very important but often neglected subject: the economics of climate change. The applied econ bug first bit Capalbo in the early 1980s at the University of California, Davis, where she received her Ph.D. in agricultural economics. But it wasn’t until the early 2000s,…

Are Observational Networks Missing a Decline in Precipitation?

In the Western United States, some 75 percent of the precipitation falls in the mountains. Not surprisingly, then, researchers and managers count on accurate precipitation measures from their high-altitude weather stations. But the mountains themselves could be preventing accurate measures. That’s because the distribution of stations is inadequate to measure certain important climatic changes. That’s…