tikiwanderer (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} tikiwanderer) wrote,@ 2007-02-03 11:30:00 |
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The IPCC's report on climate change, and what you should know about it
The IPCC is the InterGovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Its job is to collect together all the science research from around the world to do with climate change, and work out what we do and don't know, and feed that information back to governments. It's a fairly conservative body, as any grouping of a few thousand scientists will be.
They've just put out a report that sums up where we're at, and what we do know about:
* what's happened since the last report
* what's happened to our climate and weather
* what the link between them is, and how well we know that link
* projections into the future of what will happen to our climate and weather if we behave in different ways
This is their fourth report. The last one was in 2001, so this is a pretty solid update. It's had something like 2500 authors and 450 lead authors. It consists of a main report (about 750 pages), a technical summary (about 75 pages), and a summary for policymakers (about 12 pages).
You should read the summary for policymakers if you want to know the state-of-the-(global)-nation on climate change science and global warming. It's downloadable from www.ipcc.ch.
Every sentence of the summary for policymakers has been approved, by consensus, by the science community and governmental delegations from more than 150 countries, including ours. The various governments and delegations just spent a week in Paris pushing the scientists to prove the veracity and scientific quality of their results. What this means is that every word in this summary is considered to be correct science by every government, without argument. This report says what science knows, and how well we know it. There is no argument, there are no dissenters. It's consensus.
Read this summary, and you'll know what's going on. It's not too hard to read, it was written for politicians.
I haven't read the report yet - it was released yesterday evening, and it's my weekend homework. I will have read it by Monday, and I'll write a bit more on it then. What I learnt from the media briefing I went to this morning was that the improvement in our ability to model climate, in our available computer power, and in our understandings of the science involved, means that the IPCC is now able to use the word "unequivocal" in statements. As in:
* it is unequivocal that global warming is occurring
* (Edit 4/2 (blame my early morning brain)) it is 90% certain, at a conservative estimate, that human activities are causing this warming
When they wrote their last report, they were only 80-95% certain, as little as 60% on the human side of things (though even then they could say they were more than 90% certain that our use of fossil fuels would be the thing that most impacted the problem in this century). Now they know for sure that global warming is happening. It's not arguable any more.
This report does not talk in detail about impacts, or on mitigation attempts. There will be future reports on these topics released over the next few months.
The IPCC is the InterGovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Its job is to collect together all the science research from around the world to do with climate change, and work out what we do and don't know, and feed that information back to governments. It's a fairly conservative body, as any grouping of a few thousand scientists will be.
They've just put out a report that sums up where we're at, and what we do know about:
* what's happened since the last report
* what's happened to our climate and weather
* what the link between them is, and how well we know that link
* projections into the future of what will happen to our climate and weather if we behave in different ways
This is their fourth report. The last one was in 2001, so this is a pretty solid update. It's had something like 2500 authors and 450 lead authors. It consists of a main report (about 750 pages), a technical summary (about 75 pages), and a summary for policymakers (about 12 pages).
You should read the summary for policymakers if you want to know the state-of-the-(global)-nation on climate change science and global warming. It's downloadable from www.ipcc.ch.
Every sentence of the summary for policymakers has been approved, by consensus, by the science community and governmental delegations from more than 150 countries, including ours. The various governments and delegations just spent a week in Paris pushing the scientists to prove the veracity and scientific quality of their results. What this means is that every word in this summary is considered to be correct science by every government, without argument. This report says what science knows, and how well we know it. There is no argument, there are no dissenters. It's consensus.
Read this summary, and you'll know what's going on. It's not too hard to read, it was written for politicians.
I haven't read the report yet - it was released yesterday evening, and it's my weekend homework. I will have read it by Monday, and I'll write a bit more on it then. What I learnt from the media briefing I went to this morning was that the improvement in our ability to model climate, in our available computer power, and in our understandings of the science involved, means that the IPCC is now able to use the word "unequivocal" in statements. As in:
* it is unequivocal that global warming is occurring
* (Edit 4/2 (blame my early morning brain)) it is 90% certain, at a conservative estimate, that human activities are causing this warming
When they wrote their last report, they were only 80-95% certain, as little as 60% on the human side of things (though even then they could say they were more than 90% certain that our use of fossil fuels would be the thing that most impacted the problem in this century). Now they know for sure that global warming is happening. It's not arguable any more.
This report does not talk in detail about impacts, or on mitigation attempts. There will be future reports on these topics released over the next few months.
