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Charge: Inform Congress, the public, and others on climate change science. The committee shall meet this charge by regular contact - including materials - with Congressional staff and federal employees on the science of climate change and its impacts. It will seek requests from congressional staff for statisticians’ perspective on aspects of the science of climate change and its impacts. The committee will collaborate with scientists from other disciplines on this charge through contact with other professional societies and science organizations. The committee will also relate its experiences to ASA membership so that other statisticians might benefit from the committee’s study of how statisticians can inform Congress and the public.

The committee also advises the ASA board on issues relating to climate change and seeks to inform policymakers on climate issues. The committee was active in the organizing of multi-society letters on climate change—e.g., the 2016 letter to Congress signed by 31 scientific societies—and other letters such as this letter expressing deep concern for the elimination of its Institute for Mathematics Applied to the Geosciences by the National Center for Atmospheric Research. The committee also made a compelling case in 2014 for a federally-funded interdisciplinary research program around climate, where statisticians have the opportunity to collaborate with researchers from other disciplines to advance the understanding of the climate system.

The committee welcomes comments on this aspect of their charge through communications to its staff liaison, ASA Director of Science Policy Steve Pierson.

The committee leads the ASA’s participation Climate Science Day (CSD), an annual event where scientists from many disciplines visit Congress to inform policymakers about climate change science and serve as a resource for inquiries.  Climate Science Day is organized collaboratively by more than a dozen scientific professional associations to build relationships between climate researchers and Congress and to inform policymakers of the consensus view of the scientific community on climate change. The collaboration leading CSD is called the Climate Science Working Group.

The second principal activity of the committee is organizing sessions at a variety of conferences on climate-related topics. For the Joint Statistical and other statistical meetings, the goal is to interest the statistical community in climate related research and to keep the community informed of statistical developments in this area; for non-statistical conferences, to provide a statistical perspective and foster cross disciplinary collaborations.

The committee has participated in a number of other activities since its founding in late 2008, including organizing a special issue of CHANCE, The Role of Statistics in Climate Research, and a widely viewed article in Amstat News on the status of climate change science.

The committee welcomes ideas for further activities through communications to its staff liaison, ASA Director of Science Policy Steve Pierson.