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During the development of the Third U.S. National Climate Assessment, an indicators system was recommended as a foundational product to support a sustained assessment process (Buizer et al. ). The development of this system, which we call the National Climate Indicators System (NCIS), has been an important early product of a sustained assessment process. In this paper, we describe the scoping and development of recommendations and prototypes for the NCIS, with the expectation that the process and lessons learned will be useful to others developing suites of indicators. Key factors of initial success are detailed, as well as a robust vision and decision criteria for future development; we also provide suggestions for voluntary support of the broader scientific community, and for funding priorities, including a research team to coordinate and prototype the indicators, system, and process. Moving forward, sufficient coordination and scientific expertise to implement and maintain the NCIS, as well as creation of a structure for scientific input from the broader community, will be crucial to its success. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies on persistence are important for the clarification of statistical properties of the analyzed time series and for understanding the dynamics of the systems which create these series. In climatology, the analysis of the autocorrelation function has been the main tool to investigate the persistence of a time series. In this paper, we propose to use a more sophisticated econometric instrument. Using this tool, we obtain an estimate of the persistence in global land and ocean and hemispheric temperature time series. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To date the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has concerned itself with gathering a state of the art review of the science of climate change. While significant progress has been made in enhancing our integrated understanding of the climate system and the dynamics of the social systems that produce an array of potential greenhouse gases, it is also clear from the panel's reports how far the science community is from being able to present a dynamic and synoptic view of the climate system as a whole. Clear evidence of these complexities and uncertainties inherent in the climate system is evident in efforts aimed at designing robust policy interventions. In this paper, we argue that the adaptive management framework in ecosystem management may be a useful model for guiding how the IPCC can continue to be relevant both as a scientific establishment and as a policy-relevant scientific endeavor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]