For Archaeologists,Geologists, Volcanologists

[madnak]

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But anyone living near a river will get flooded every so often.

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This is particularly true of the Tigris and Euphrates flood plains, where western civilization started. The rivers are unpredictable and floods could devastate early communities. Flood myths stand to reason.

[Silent A]

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Anyways, when I read your bio it struck me that you were more preparing for climate change rather than trying to prevent it. I'm all for preventing something if that's the best way to go. But I'm not for focussing on preventing something, wasting a bunch of resources on inffective measures and then being ill-prepared when it does (inevitably) come.

Is this something along the lines of how you feel about climate change?

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Personally, from what I've seen when looking at the climate change research, talking to people who are climatologists working in the field, and thinking about where (global) society is going, I'm pretty much convinced that anthropomorphic climate change is very real and more or less inevitable. Inevitable because the large scale political mechanisms needed to be brought to bear are too slow to react and probably won't even start until it's too late. The only questions for me are: how much warming, how fast, and where will it warm most/least? So I've more or less given up on prevention, at least in the short term. That would be my political stance anyway.

At the academic level, I just don't have the expertise in climatology to seriously study climate change itself. Instead, I have to rely on the work of real climatologists and use their results to address engineering problems. That's were my work comes in: developing techniques to estimate future river flows based on the results of various climate scenarios from several GCMs. I should point out that these scenarios include both the optimistic (rapid conversion to a low carbon economy) and pessimistic (accelerating use of carbon, especially coal), so an element of prevention is included.

That said, given that changes of one type or another will happen, it's important to at least try to estimate what kind of changes we could expect so that we can manage our water resources appropriately, and at least be prepared to adapt even if we end up waiting until these changes actually take place.

[PantsOnFire]

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Anyways, when I read your bio it struck me that you were more preparing for climate change rather than trying to prevent it. I'm all for preventing something if that's the best way to go. But I'm not for focussing on preventing something, wasting a bunch of resources on inffective measures and then being ill-prepared when it does (inevitably) come.

Is this something along the lines of how you feel about climate change?

[/ QUOTE ]

Personally, from what I've seen when looking at the climate change research, talking to people who are climatologists working in the field, and thinking about where (global) society is going, I'm pretty much convinced that anthropomorphic climate change is very real and more or less inevitable. Inevitable because the large scale political mechanisms needed to be brought to bear are too slow to react and probably won't even start until it's too late. The only questions for me are: how much warming, how fast, and where will it warm most/least? So I've more or less given up on prevention, at least in the short term. That would be my political stance anyway.

At the academic level, I just don't have the expertise in climatology to seriously study climate change itself. Instead, I have to rely on the work of real climatologists and use their results to address engineering problems. That's were my work comes in: developing techniques to estimate future river flows based on the results of various climate scenarios from several GCMs. I should point out that these scenarios include both the optimistic (rapid conversion to a low carbon economy) and pessimistic (accelerating use of carbon, especially coal), so an element of prevention is included.

That said, given that changes of one type or another will happen, it's important to at least try to estimate what kind of changes we could expect so that we can manage our water resources appropriately, and at least be prepared to adapt even if we end up waiting until these changes actually take place.

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Thanks for the reply and good luck with your work. I am going to be busy trying to keep bad guys out of government computer systems.