Interesting story here from Nature.com. Although delegates to the World Climate Conference agreed to share climate information, it’s far from a done deal and lots of folks don’t like the idea. Note the mention of Tom Karl of Asheville’s National Climatic Data Center:
A global framework to supply on-demand climate predictions to governments, businesses or individuals is moving closer to reality.
Delegates representing 155 nations at the World Climate Conference in Geneva, Switzerland, agreed on 3 September that a body should be established to supply these ‘climate services’ to users ranging from national governments to individual farmers. The service would particularly help developing nations, for example, many of which lack access to the weather and climate observations needed to plan their global-warming adaptation strategies.
Over the next four months, an independent task force set up by World Meteorological Organization, which convened the conference, will work out how to make this vision a reality. An arduous 12-month consultation process with signatory nations will then follow.
“It’s about time we got serious,” says climatologist Jonathan Overpeck of the University of Arizona in Tucson. “We can save wealth and properties if we get climate information into the hands of decision-makers.”
But a global climate service will face a host of scientific and political hurdles. Negotiating data collection and sharing among member states will be a big challenge, for example. “It has been a huge issue in the past to ensure that data are as fully as accessible as possible,” says Tom Karl, director of the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, North Carolina.
Some countries are already baulking at the suggestion that they will need to supply the service with data, citing issues such as national security or commercial interests that would prevent disclosure.