Editorial: Climate Change and Variability, Uncertainty and Decision- Making

摘要

An evolving and important trend in the provision of scientific advice is the explicit statement of uncertainty. When confronted with uncertainty, policy makers often tend to ignore it. Instead, they may consider decision parameters to be single-valued and deterministic or solicit expert opinion and trust it implicitly as the best estimate. The uncertainty, which is fundamental to the problem, is often suppressed as an annoying and confusing aspect. The inherent variability of the weather at different spatial and temporal scales ensures that there will always be unpredictable, extreme weather events. These deviations from what might locally be called normal weather can be quite pleasant, such as an abnormally warm winter day, or disastrous. Recent disasters associated with extreme atmospheric events have placed extreme weather events in the fore of the world's policy arenas.