Deliberative Mini-Publics and the European Green Deal in Turbulent Times: The Irish and French Climate Assemblies

Innovative forms of deliberative democracy are gaining traction in governing responses to climate change in Europe and beyond. Proponents of deliberative democracy have drawn attention to its particular suitability for shaping responses to environmental challenges. Citizen engagement and participation is also a prominent feature of the European Green Deal. This article considers the relationship between turbulence and deliberative democracy in the context of climate transitions, exploring when and how such democratic innovations are likely to generate turbulence in the governance of climate transitions. A framework is developed that focuses on three important sets of characteristics of deliberative mini-publics (DMPs): (a) the nature of their formal mandates and the ways in which climate change is framed as a policy problem; (b) the nature of participation and the degree to which the participants are empowered to shape the deliberative processes in which they participate; and (c) the degree to which DMPs are coupled with relevant policymaking processes. This framework is used to explore two recent and high-profile cases of a particular type of DMP: citizens’ assemblies in Ireland and France. The article contributes to the literatures on turbulent governance and deliberative democracy by reflecting on key dimensions of DMPs from the analytical perspective of turbulent governance.

PaleoJump database for research on rapid climate transitions

<p><span>Tipping poi</span><span>nts (TPs) in the </span><span>Earth system have been studied with growing interest and concern in recent years due to the potential risk of anthropogenic forcing causing abrupt, and possibly irreversible, climate transitions. Paleoclimate records are essential for identifying TPs in the Earth’s past and to properly understand the climate system’s underlying bifurcation mechanisms. </span><span>Due to their varying quality, resolution, and dating methods, it is often necessary to select the records that give the best representation of past climate. Furthermore, as paleoclimate records vary in their origin, time spans, and periodicities, an objective, automated methodology is crucial for identifying and comparing </span><span>TP</span><span>s. </span></p><p><span>To reach this goal, here we present the PaleoJump database of carefully selected, high-resolution records originating in ice, marine sediments, speleothems, loess, and lake sediments. These records, which include tipping elements, cover long time intervals and represent a global distribution from all continents and ocean basins. For every record, a transition detection methodology based on an augmented Kolmogorov-Smirnov test is applied to identify abrupt transitions. The PaleoJump database </span><span>highlights</span><span> these automatically detected transitions for every record together with other essential information, including location, temporal scale and resolution, as well as temporal plots; it therefore represents a valuable resource for researchers investigating TPs in past climates. This study is supported by</span> <span>the H2020-funded</span> <span>TiPES project.</span></p>

Towards more physically constrained freshwater injection via eddy permitting simulations of the last glacial cycle

<p>Freshwater, in the form of glacial runoff, is hypothesized to play a critical role in centennial to millennial scale climate variability, eg. the Younger Dryas and Dansgaard Oeschger events. Freshwater injection, or hosing, model experiments demonstrate that freshwater has the capability to generate abrupt climate transitions.  However, in an attempt to mitigate the inability of most models to resolve the smaller-scale features relevant to freshwater transport (such as boundary currents and mesoscale eddies), these hosing experiments commonly apply the entirety of the freshwater directly to the regions of deepwater formation (DWF). Our results indicate that this can inflate the freshwater signal in those regions by as much as four times. We propose a novel method of freshwater injection for such low-resolution models that spatially distributes the freshwater in accord with the results of eddy-permitting modelling. Furthermore, this “freshwater fingerprint” method not only impacts the timing of simulated climate transitions but also can allow us to evaluate how much we are overestimating the effects of freshwater when injected directly into sites of DWF.</p><p> </p><p>The freshwater fingerprints we develop are based on a suite of freshwater injection experiments performed using an eddy permitting Younger Dryas configuration of the MITGCM. Freshwater injection locations include the Mackenzie River, Gulf of St. Lawrence, Gulf of Mexico and a location off the coast of Norway, with flux amounts bounded by glacial reconstructions. These simulations indicate that freshwater from the Mackenzie River and Fennoscandia have the largest impact on salinity in most of the conventional sites of DWF (GIN and Labrador Seas, and in these simulations, predominantly the northern North Atlantic due to extensive sea ice), while freshwater from the Gulf of St. Lawrence is effective at freshening only the northern North Atlantic. The Gulf of Mexico has little impact on any DWF region we consider, mostly because the lower but continual flux in our simulations does not allow freshwater to penetrate northward past the Gulf Stream. The dilution of the freshwater signal as it is transported from the site of injection to the DWF zones leads to a reduction in the effective freshwater forcing, making hosing directly over DWF zones even with realistic freshwater amounts unrealistic. Thus, we construct freshwater fingerprints from these simulations by extracting the freshwater anomaly spatial pattern averaged over the last 5 simulation years, vertically integrating the field and normalizing it.</p><p><br>The freshwater fingerprint is then implemented in the COSMOS Earth Systems Model, which is run at resolutions typical for paleoclimate simulations (non-eddy permitting). Initial results show that freshwater from the Mackenzie River using our  fingerprint method leads to a more gradual cooling than if the meltwater is released directly over the hosing region (50-70N). We conclude that hosing over DWF zones, even with realistic freshwater amounts, produces an unrealistically large climate response. Additional results for the remaining injection locations and with the fingerprint implemented in a simpler climate model will be presented.</p>