cc: Mike Hulme date: Sun, 22 Feb 2004 23:15:00 +0000 from: Suraje Dessai subject: RE: Your article submitted to climate policy to: michael.grubb@imperial.ac.uk,climatepolicy@imperial.ac.uk Dear Michael and Ray, I am very glad to hear that Climate Policy will resume publication shortly; I feel very strongly that this journal should continue since in its short life it has been extremely successful, in my opinion. We hope our revised review paper (which I attach) can come out asap, perhaps in the first issue of the journal with the new publishers. Thank you for the reviewers comments you sent me in December 2003. They were very constructive and I believe we managed to address all the issues they raised. I next explain the changes Ive made to the manuscript according to the comments of each reviewer: Reviewer 1 (Steve) P10 analogs discussion: Added the sentence Therefore, while analogues can be extremely useful to calibrate our understanding of how the system works, they are limited by the unique and transient nature of future climate change. We decided to delete the Pielke and Sarewitz polemical sentence and the accuracy statement altogether because of the reviewers comments; We chose not to unpack some of these issues here because it would increase the word length considerably and it would not flow well with the text (instead its brought up in a later section). P14: Added the sentence: For complex systems, like climate change, it is more likely than with simple well constrained systems that this type of uncertainty grows at first with more research. P15: Deleted the unfair sentence a point that was not explicitly mentioned by Grubler and Nakicenovic (2001) or Shneirder (2002) which we think is important and which completes the rest of the picture regarding unknowable knowledge. and added synonymous to reflexivity: which some scientists call human volition or feedback. P16: Added the sentence: Nonetheless, there are a range of efforts, such as integrated assessment or agent-based modelling, that try to do just this, even if integrated assessment has neglected adaptation almost entirely (Toth, 2000) and agent-based modelling is still immature in its application to climate change (see Ziervogel et al., 2004 for an application to seasonal climate forecasting). P18: Corrected this P24: We believe we already give our views in the text, which are very much in line with the reviewers comments. We show this in bold here: This is a real danger that only scientists involved in the research can prevent by proper communication of uncertainty. It is important to emphasise that these subjective probabilities are highly conditional upon the assumptions made; again the need to be as explicit and transparent as possible cannot be emphasised enough. Our view on conditional probabilities is that we should not wait for perfect information (e.g. a single pdf since this is not attainable because of unquantifiable uncertainties) before providing decision-makers with the best available scientific information for their questions. A combination of conditional probabilities and scenarios will be required. P25: this paragraph deals with planned adaptation in human systems so it is bound to be anthropocentric. P26: Weve changed the sentence to We believe human reflexive uncertainty is largely unquantifiable in probabilistic , but I think we fundamentally disagree with the reviewer in this point. We think he is taking a very narrow view of reflexivity, whereas we are taking a broad view, also including social and cultural levels. He also seems to focus more on mitigation, whereas the focus of this paper is exclusively on adaptation. In the context of adaptation to climate change, quantifying this type of uncertainty is logically impossible. For example, if we predict there is a 75% probability that we are heading towards a SRES A2 world (with its associated climate impacts) then people are going to react to this and change their behaviour accordingly. By doing this, the boundary conditions of the problem have changed and so the prediction is no longer valid. One could redo the prediction, but then the boundary conditions would change again (just because human being think) and so on. Hence our statement that it is unquantifiable. Reviewer 2 We have separated section 5.2 (assessment and policy) into section 5.2 (assessment) and section 5.3 (policy). 1. Added the sentence Probability assessment in the context of climate change is always subjective, conditional and provisional. to the abstract. 2. Corrected this by changing the sentence to but reflexive human behaviour (i.e., actions explicitly influenced by information) instead of just mentioning human reflexive uncertainty. 3. The paper does not intend to be comprehensive in terms of climate policy (mitigation and adaptation); it does intend to be comprehensive in terms of climate adaptation policy so we have changed the title accordingly. Or course adding a discussion on mitigation policy would be desirable, but it would also add considerably to the word length. 4. We already make these recommendations in section 5.1. In: Lessons from previous assessments have shown that a regional approach with the inclusion and participation of stakeholders has the best potential to advance the assessment and implementation of adaptation options. Stakeholders are crucial ingredients of what is proposed because they are the people whose decisions must take account of climate change (and other environmental stresses), who hold the specialised practical knowledge needed to evaluate adaptation options, and who are the primary source of technological and managerial activities needed to implement them (Parson et al. 2003). We have noted that the article is rather long, but as the reviewers have warned, shortening it would result in losing its important function of review article and the excellent scholarship it reports on. Therefore, Id urge the editors to publish the paper as it. Figure 2 is currently in colour, but if colour printing is not available (at no cost) then I can easily convert it to black and white. Please acknowledge the receipt of this e-mail. Cheers, Suraje At 12:35 19/02/2004 +0100, you wrote: I am pleased to say that there is now good prospect that Climate Policy will resume publication under new publishers and I should be able to make an announcement during February. With thanks for your patience, Michael Grubb -----Original Message----- From: climatepolicy Sent: 17 December 2003 16:36 To: s.dessai@gmx.net Cc: Grubb, Michael J Subject: Your article submitted to climate policy Dear Suraje We are really very sorry that there has been a considerable delay between you submitting your article to Climate Policy and us communicating a decision to you as to whether we wish to publish it or not. In principle we consider the paper nearly ready for publication subject to taking into account the brief comments of referees (attached) and a significant shortening of the paper to confirm with word length policy. As we may have indicated in an earlier previous email there have been uncertainties surrounding the future of the journal after the initial contracts with the publishers expire at the end of this year. We had hoped to inform you by now as to whether the publishers Elsevier have reached a decision as to the future of the journal beyond 2003, but unfortunately despite our very best efforts they have not. As a direct result of this Ray and I have had no option but to resign from our positions at Climate Policy and we regret to inform you that we will cease working for Climate Policy at the end of this month when the contracts with the publishers expire (December 2003). We understand your frustration that no decision has been made on your submitted paper and we really do empathize. We have also being waiting for a decision from Elsevier for many months now. We do not know whether the journal will continue with other editors, in another form, or will fold at this stage. We suggest that if you have any further queries regarding the future of the journal and your paper that you should contact Jacques Kiebert at Elseiver on the following email J.Kiebert@elsevier.nl - it would be useful if you could copy any email sent to him to the climate policy email as well so we can forward the current state of refereeing concerning your paper. Michael also may be in touch with you in the New Year concerning an alternative journal for publication that may be able to take your paper promptly. Thanks and good wishes Michael Grubb and Ray Purdy Climate Policy Attachment Converted: "c:\eudora\attach\Letter to editor.doc" Attachment Converted: "c:\eudora\attach\Climate_Policy_revised_final2.doc"