The CLEX Knowledge Brokerage Team (KBT) is now well and truly bedded down after coming into existence in October 2018. Team leader Ian Macadam has visited each of the CLEX university nodes and has attempted to answer the question on everyone’s lips “So what is a knowledge broker anyway?”.
Lavanya Rajamani (The Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi) The international climate change negotiations, plagued as they are by deep-seated and seemingly irresolvable differences, have had to demonstrate remarkable dexterity over the years in skirting political dysfunction to reach agreement. The agreements reached reflect innovation and experimentation in several respects: the architecture of the legal instruments adopted, the profusion of norms of differing legal character in these instruments, the forms of differentiation between developed and developing countries, and even in... View Article
At present, the most important strategy to avert such consequences would be investment in CO2 down-draw measures and the channeling water from flooded to desiccated regions, such as from northern Australia to the Murray-Darling basins
An international group of scientists has now forecast the likelihood global warming will exceed 1.5C over the next 5 years. This is one of the thresholds of the UNFCCC’s Paris Agreement, which aims “to strengthen the global response to the threat of climate change by keeping a global temperature rise this century well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase even further to 1.5°C”.
The Climate Variability and Teleconnections Research Program has formed into three separate clusters – SAM, Tropical Variability and Oceans.
The Heatwaves and Cold Outbreaks Research Program is in full swing, welcoming a new associate investigator in Debbie Hudson from the Bureau of Meteorology and pressing ahead with research across a range of areas.
In relation to the Paris Agreement targets of 1.5°C and 2°C, new research shows the differences in results between pattern-scaling and climate model output were primarily due to forcings other than changes to greenhouse gas emissions.
At this early stage in the research program, we have already seen significant progress on understanding how well temperature extremes can be simulated with CABLE coupled to the ACCESS system. Coupling has been improved and we have identified possible causes for the tendency for the model temperature to overstate extremes. This model focus will continue to be a priority in the early part of 2018. The team has also identified specific continental heatwaves for initial investigation.
It has been raining awards since the new Extreme Rainfall research program began. Most recently, Jason Evans and Julie Arblaster were co-winners of the AMOS Priestley Medal and Christian Jakob was made an AMOS Fellow. Across in Europe, Partner Investigator Sandrine Bony at the Institut Pierre Simon Laplace was awarded the Gérard Mégie Prize by the French Academy of Sciences.
The ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate Extremes was formally started on August 4, 2017. We have a Centre launch on April 10, which is something we all look forward to. A great deal of effort has gone into hiring some outstanding research fellows and multiple new CLEX students. The research leaders of the Centre's four programs have met to refine their research strategies and identify the main priorities.