<i>HESS Opinions</i> "Climate, hydrology, energy, water: recognizing uncertainty and seeking sustainability"

Abstract

Since 1990 extensive funds have been spent on research in climate change. Although Earth Sciences, including climatology and hydrology, have benefited significantly , progress has proved incommensurate with the effort and funds, perhaps because these disciplines were perceived as "tools" subservient to the needs of the climate change enterprise rather than autonomous sciences. At the same time, research was misleadingly focused more on the "symptom", i.e. the emission of greenhouse gases, than on the "illness", i.e. the unsustainability of fossil fuel-based energy production. Unless energy saving and use of renewable resources become the norm, there is a real risk of severe socioeconomic crisis in the not-too-distant future. A framework for drastic paradigm change is needed, in which water plays a central role, due to its unique link to all forms of renewable energy , from production (hydro and wave power) to storage (for time-varying wind and solar sources), to biofuel production (irrigation). The extended role of water should be considered in parallel to its other uses, domestic, agricultural and industrial. Hydrology, the science of water on Earth, must move towards this new paradigm by radically rethinking its fundamentals, which are unjustifiably trapped in the 19th-century myths of deterministic theories and the zeal to eliminate uncertainty. Guidance is offered by modern statistical and quantum physics, which reveal the intrinsic character of uncertainty/entropy in nature, thus advancing towards a new understanding and modelling of physical processes, which is central to the effective use of renewable energy and water resources. Only the small secrets need to be protected. The big ones are kept secret by public incredulity. (attributed to Marshall McLuhan) 1 Climate and climate change impacts Since 1990, major funds of the order of billions of euro have been spent in Europe and worldwide on research into projected climate change, its impacts, and emerging vulnerabil-ities. Earth sciences including climatology and hydrology have played a central role in this scene and benefited significantly. Technological advances in satellite observations and supercomputing have also been beneficial to these scientific disciplines. On the other hand, scientific progress has been arguably incommensurate to the effort and funds spent, perhaps because these disciplines have been perceived as "tools" subservient to the needs of the climate change enterprise rather than autonomous sciences. Despite generous funds, the targets set have not been achieved. Uncertainties in projections of future climate change have not lessened substantially in past decades (Roe and Baker, 2007). The value added by the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report (AR4; IPCC, 2007) to that of the Third Assessment Report (TAR; IPCC, 2001) is, in effect , marginal. According to IPCC AR4, "A major advance of this assessment of climate change projections compared with the TAR is the large number of simulations available f...

HESS Opinions "Crash tests for a standardized evaluation of hydrological models"

“…A site-specific model, developed on a single site, may be very successful, but the question is: will it remain so in the long run? As Koutsoyiannis et al (2009) put it, "there is no reason that the [natural] system properties remain unchanged over time." An end-user may prefer to trust a model that obtains slightly lower performance on the time series at hand, but that has been more exhaustively validated.…”

Climate, hydrology and freshwater: towards an interactive incorporation of hydrological experience into climate research

“…Data are of primary importance within the hydrological community, which embraces the premise that hydrology (and geosciences) are by nature induction-based, rather than deduction-based and rely, therefore, to a greater extent on historical data as the key to the future (Koutsoyiannis et al, 2009). KEA express a disbelief in the latter principle when they state: "Traditionally, it has been conveniently assumed that the natural water resource base is constant, and hydrological design rules have been based on the assumption of stationary hydrology, tantamount to the principle that the past is the key to the future.…”

Hydrology and change

“…This harmonizes with a more general political, ideological and economic trend of our societies to give more importance to speculations, hypotheses, scenarios and virtual reality instead of facing the facts (cf. Koutsoyiannis et al 2009). Indeed, the demographic and environmental changes of the 20th century are unprecedented and determinant, while it is well known (see also below) that climate has been in perpetual change throughout Earth's existence.…”