AR4 Synthesis Report
Post
17/11/07, Elizabeth Rosenthal & Andrew C. Revkin, U.N. Report Describes Risks of Inaction on Climate Change, Source.
14/11/07, Climate change panel too slow to react?, Source.
16/11/07, Andrew C. Revkin, A 4th Climate Warning. Anyone Listening?, Source.
17/11/07, Elizabeth Rosenthal & Andrew C. Revkin, U.N. Report Describes Risks of Inaction on Climate Change, (Back).
VALENCIA, Spain, Nov. 16 — In its final and most powerful report, a United Nations panel of scientists meeting here describes the mounting risks of climate change in language that is both more specific and forceful than its previous assessments, according to scientists here.
Synthesizing reams of data from its three previous reports, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change for the first time specifically points out important risks if governments fail to respond: melting ice sheets that could lead to a rapid rise in sea levels and the extinction of large numbers of species brought about by even moderate amounts of warming, on the order of 1 to 3 degrees.
The report carries heightened significance because it is the last word from the influential global climate panel before world leaders meet in Bali, Indonesia, next month to begin to discuss a global climate change treaty that will replace the Kyoto protocol, which expires in 2012. It is also the first report from the panel since it was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in October — an honor that many scientists here said emboldened them to stand more forcefully behind their positions.
As a sign of the deepening urgency surrounding the climate change issue, the report, which was being printed Friday night, will be officially released by Secretary General Ban Ki-moon on Saturday.
The full report was embargoed from news organizations until Saturday. But drafts have been circulating for weeks, and descriptions of its findings began to appear on Web sites and in news agency reports on Friday. Bush administration officials held a news conference to discuss the report but insisted that their comments be withheld until after its official release.
“This document goes further than any of the previous efforts,” said Hans Verolme, director of the World Wildlife Fund’s Global Climate Change Program. “The pressure has been palpable — people know they are delivering a document that will be cited for years to come and will define policy.”
The previous three sections, released between February and April, focused on one issue at a time: the first on science, the second on how the world could adapt to warming and the third about how countries could “mitigate,” or reduce the greenhouse gases produced.
This fourth and final assessment — the so-called synthesis report — seeks to combine lessons from all three. Its conclusions are culled from data contained in the thousands of pages that were essentially technical supplements to the panel’s previous publications. How that data is summarized and presented to the world is a powerful guide to what the scientists consider of utmost importance at the end of a five-year process, offering concrete guidelines for policy makers.
“You look to a synthesis report to provide clarity, to clarify what was obscure in previous reports,” said Michael Oppenheimer, a climate scientist at Princeton University. “Now, how can we take these findings and formulate a policy response that’s quick enough and big enough?”
While drafts of the panel’s reports are written by panels of scientists, the language is reviewed and often altered by delegates from 130 governments who meet before their final approval and release. Those negotiations took place here this week, and were often contentious, with the United States, China and India raising many objections, said scientists who spoke on condition of anonymity because they are not allowed to publicly refer to any countries by name.
The scientists and country representatives who had flocked here this week to participate in negotiations on the final wording applauded as the panel’s chairman, Rajendra Pachauri, declared the panel’s years of work concluded, just after 10:30 p.m. on Friday.
Even though the synthesis report is more alarming than its predecessors, some researchers believe that it still understates the trajectory of global warming and its impact. The I.P.C.C.’s scientific process, which takes five years of study and writing from start to finish, cannot take into account the very latest data on climate change or economic trends, which show larger than predicted development and energy use in China.
“The world is already at or above the worst case scenarios in terms of emissions,” said Gernot Klepper, of the Kiel Institute for World Economy in Kiel, Germany. “In terms of emissions, we are moving past the most pessimistic estimates of the I.P.C.C., and by some estimates we are above that red line.”
The panel presents several scenarios for the trajectory of emissions and climate change. In 2006, 8.4 gigatons of carbon were put into the atmosphere from fossil fuels, according to a study in the proceedings of the National Academy of Science, which was co-written by Dr. Klepper. That is almost identical to the panel’s worst case prediction for that year.
Likewise, a recent International Energy Agency report looking at the unexpectedly rapid emissions growth in China and India estimated that if current policies were not changed the world would warm six degrees by 2030, a disastrous increase far higher than the panel’s estimates of one to four degrees by the end of the century.
While the United States, Saudi Arabia and China tried to change the text in order to play down the consequences of global warming, developing nations — which will bear the initial brunt of climate change — were much more forceful than at previous meetings in opposing these efforts, one scientist who was in the negotiating room said.
"I suspect that will continue,” he said. “As they feel more and more threatened by the sea and the storms they will insist that, as one of them put it, ‘We do not want this report to be warm and fuzzy when the reality is cold and risky,’ or something like that,” he said.
One novel aspect of the report is a specific list of “Reasons for Concern.” It includes items that are thought to be very likely outgrowths of climate change that had been mentioned in previous reports, like an increase in extreme weather events.
But it for the first time includes less likely but more alarming possibilities, like the relatively rapid melting of polar ice. Previous reports focused more on changes the scientists felt were “highly likely.”
“This time, they take a step back and look at the totality,” Dr. Verolme said. “Saying it is less likely to occur, but if it does we are fried.”
One such area is the future melting of ice sheets in Greenland and western Antarctica. In earlier reports, the panel’s scientists acknowledged that their computer models were poor at such predictions, and did not reflect the rapid melting that scientists have recently observed. If these areas melt entirely, seas would rise 40 feet, scientists said. While scientists are certain that the sheets will melt over millennia, producing sea-level rises, there is now evidence to suggest that it could happen much faster than this, perhaps over centuries.
“In my view that would make it not just difficult, but impossible to adapt successfully, some of my colleagues would say catastrophic,” said Dr. Oppenheimer. “If they say that it’s possible that melting could occur in centuries leading to meters of change, that’s a headline.”
This final report also puts more emphasis on the ripple effect of small degrees of temperature change, some of which are already being seen, such as species extinctions and loss of biodiversity.
“A relatively modest degree of warming — one to three degrees — spells a lot of trouble and I think that was not clear in the previous report,” Dr. Oppenheimer said. He said part of the reason for the lack of clarity was that governments had “messed around” with the language and structure of the report during the approval process.
This time around, the consequences of different degrees of climate change will be better laid out so that the ministers who meet in Bali next month will understand the options and the consequences of inaction. “This should light a fire under policy makers,” Dr. Oppenheimer said.
14/11/07, Climate change panel too slow to react?, (Back).
Diplomacy and peer reviews make for reports that can lag the science.
VALENCIA, Spain - They are seen as the gurus of global warming, and their reports are accepted almost as the gospel of climate science. Esteem for the panel of scientists was immortalized when it shared this year's Nobel Peace prize.
But experts and the scientists themselves acknowledge the reports are conservative and have a poor track record of predictions.
As the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change meets in this Mediterranean coastal city to finish its fourth report in two decades, it must decide whether it will produce a fifth.
"Next year would complete 20 years of the IPCC," said chairman Rajendra Pachauri. "That clearly is a point where we should carry out deep and detailed introspection on what we have achieved, what we could have achieved further, and how we might be able to ensure achievement in the future."
The future of the panel, which shared the Nobel with former Vice President Al Gore, is an agenda item at the weeklong meeting that wraps up Saturday with the release of its latest climate change assessment.
The panel, a loose organization of more than 2,000 scientists who submit their own research and review the work of others, has issued extensive reports on global warming every five or six years since it was created under the auspices of two U.N. bodies. Each report includes a brief Summary for Policymakers, which is approved by government representatives.
Driven by peer reviews
The assessment reports have won accolades as the most authoritative compilation of climate science available, largely because of the rigorous process of peer review. Even if the data produced by different researchers may conflict, the science is deemed to be solid.
But its thoroughness is also a shackle that condemns it to lag behind the latest research. It usually takes the collaborative efforts of dozens of IPCC authors about two years to compile a report and takes at least a year for a scientific paper to be reviewed.
In its assessment this year, the IPCC has reported with near certainty that human activity is causing temperatures to rise and changing weather patterns. Sea levels are rising, storms are growing more fierce, deserts are spreading and glaciers are melting, it said. The panel predicts that millions of poor people will suffer from hunger, thirst, floods and disease unless drastic action is taken. But it also says the tools are available, or soon will be, to greatly slow global warming, soften the impact and help nations adapt to changing conditions.
As grim as that may look, the reality may be much worse.
"We need to understand that the worst impacts in the report may not in fact be the worst that will happen, or the worst that appear possible," said Peter Altman, the climate policy project manager for the National Environmental Trust, a Washington lobby.
"What's in the report now is scary enough. But in most of the predictions the IPCC has made, just about everything is happening faster and more intensely than we thought," he said. "This issue is not being overstated. If anything, it is being understated."
Think tanks cite shortfall
A joint report this month by two U.S. security institutes said they compared predictions of climate change by the panel and other researchers in the last two decades with changes that actually occurred, and found the scientists had consistently fallen short.
Part of the reason was the lack of data, but it also could be that the scientists shied away from controversy and wanted to avoid being discredited as "alarmists," said the paper by the Center for Strategic International Studies and the Center for a New American Security.
The scientists see their caution as a strength rather than a shortcoming.
"The process tends to lead to a fairly conservative outcome," said Bert Metz, one of the IPCC's lead authors, because the scientists will wait for verification of research before pronouncing a possible trend.
"By not using an alarmist or advocatist tone, you in the end gain much more credibility," said Metz, of the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency.
The World Wide Fund for Nature, or WWF International, which is invited with other environmental groups to observe IPCC meetings, agrees the IPCC process is cumbersome and late.
"Climate change is going faster than our worst-case scenarios of five or six years ago," said WWF's climate specialist Hans Verolme.
Still, he said, it would be difficult for the panel to issue more frequent reports to try to keep pace with the research without sacrificing its scientific integrity. "I wouldn't know how to speed up the process," he said.
16/11/07, Andrew C. Revkin, A 4th Climate Warning. Anyone Listening?, (Back).
It was the culmination of an extraordinary meeting on the human-changed atmosphere. For three days, scientists had described how a buildup of long-lived gases emitted by burning fuels and forests would, if it continued, raise temperatures, raise seas and disrupt weather patterns important to agriculture, water supplies and wildlife.
As the conference concluded, a leader of the group, Michael McElroy of Harvard, stood and said this: “If we choose to take on this challenge, it appears that we can slow the rate of change substantially, giving us time to develop mechanisms so that the cost to society and the damage to ecosystems can be minimized. We could alternatively close our eyes, hope for the best, and pay the cost when the bill comes due.”
That was June 1988. Dr. McElroy’s statement was the kicker on my first long story on global warming, which ran on the cover of Discover magazine a few months later.
That year also saw the birth of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Tonight in Valencia, Spain, the panel completed the final summary section of its latest review of what is known, possible and still a mystery about how human activities are influencing Earth’s climate and what we might do about it.
This was the fourth such review since 1990. Progressively over that span, the panel’s reports have raised the likelihood that people, mainly by burning billions of tons of coal and oil, have been the main force responsible for global warming since 1950 and that a lot more warming, coastal retreats and shifting weather are in the offing under business as usual. (In the bargain we get some plankton-harming ocean acidification, something not anticipated originally).
The rituals surrounding the release of these reports have always been the same. Around 10:30 p.m. local time on Friday in Valencia, according to my colleague Elisabeth Rosenthal, applause rang out when Rajendra K. Pachauri, the chairman of the panel, declared the fourth assessment completed after government officials approved the wording in a final concluding document. (There’ll be more applause in early December in Oslo when he and others snag half of the Nobel Peace Prize for nearly 20 years of painstaking, unpaid, exhausting, contentious work.)
As they always have, news services began describing the embargoed findings earlier in the evening, prodded by environmental campaigners and some scientists who hoped the results would inspire diplomats preparing to gather next month in Bali for the latest round of climate-treaty talks. Industry-backed groups issued their own news releases playing down the notion that new climate perils had been identified.
On Saturday governments will issue formal statements, each seeking to spin the findings to suit its own agenda and needs.
But the central question remains largely as it was posed by Dr. McElroy 19 years ago: Will the world’s leaders and citizens act on the basis of this building picture of a world sent into environmental flux by human actions, or choose to wait for some future round of research to clarify things a bit more?
In the meantime, the world is heading toward nine billion people, all seeking comfort and security and prosperity. A broad range of experts, within and outside the I.P.C.C., agree that sufficient energy to enable such progress (without overheating Earth) will come only with a mix of more efficient use of fossil fuels and fundamentally new energy technologies that do not influence the climate.
In essence, this challenge reflects a question I posed on Nov. 9, in a post called “What Does the Present Owe the Future“? As you can see from reader comments, there is no easy answer.
Many of the scientists involved with this marathon effort have spent more than half their lives trying to clarify what may come from what Roger Revelle, in an understated line, described in a 1957 paper as a “large scale geophysical experiment.”
In an e-mail exchange during a break in the proceedings today, Stephen H. Schneider, a Stanford University climatologist who has been in the climatology trenches since long before I quoted him in that 1988 article, put it this way (while declining to discuss the still-embargoed report): “The world learns slowly, so we keep moving forward haltingly, with backsliding, and do the best we can.”
(Back)
14/11/07, Climate change panel too slow to react?, Source.
16/11/07, Andrew C. Revkin, A 4th Climate Warning. Anyone Listening?, Source.
17/11/07, Elizabeth Rosenthal & Andrew C. Revkin, U.N. Report Describes Risks of Inaction on Climate Change, (Back).
VALENCIA, Spain, Nov. 16 — In its final and most powerful report, a United Nations panel of scientists meeting here describes the mounting risks of climate change in language that is both more specific and forceful than its previous assessments, according to scientists here.
Synthesizing reams of data from its three previous reports, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change for the first time specifically points out important risks if governments fail to respond: melting ice sheets that could lead to a rapid rise in sea levels and the extinction of large numbers of species brought about by even moderate amounts of warming, on the order of 1 to 3 degrees.
The report carries heightened significance because it is the last word from the influential global climate panel before world leaders meet in Bali, Indonesia, next month to begin to discuss a global climate change treaty that will replace the Kyoto protocol, which expires in 2012. It is also the first report from the panel since it was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in October — an honor that many scientists here said emboldened them to stand more forcefully behind their positions.
As a sign of the deepening urgency surrounding the climate change issue, the report, which was being printed Friday night, will be officially released by Secretary General Ban Ki-moon on Saturday.
The full report was embargoed from news organizations until Saturday. But drafts have been circulating for weeks, and descriptions of its findings began to appear on Web sites and in news agency reports on Friday. Bush administration officials held a news conference to discuss the report but insisted that their comments be withheld until after its official release.
“This document goes further than any of the previous efforts,” said Hans Verolme, director of the World Wildlife Fund’s Global Climate Change Program. “The pressure has been palpable — people know they are delivering a document that will be cited for years to come and will define policy.”
The previous three sections, released between February and April, focused on one issue at a time: the first on science, the second on how the world could adapt to warming and the third about how countries could “mitigate,” or reduce the greenhouse gases produced.
This fourth and final assessment — the so-called synthesis report — seeks to combine lessons from all three. Its conclusions are culled from data contained in the thousands of pages that were essentially technical supplements to the panel’s previous publications. How that data is summarized and presented to the world is a powerful guide to what the scientists consider of utmost importance at the end of a five-year process, offering concrete guidelines for policy makers.
“You look to a synthesis report to provide clarity, to clarify what was obscure in previous reports,” said Michael Oppenheimer, a climate scientist at Princeton University. “Now, how can we take these findings and formulate a policy response that’s quick enough and big enough?”
While drafts of the panel’s reports are written by panels of scientists, the language is reviewed and often altered by delegates from 130 governments who meet before their final approval and release. Those negotiations took place here this week, and were often contentious, with the United States, China and India raising many objections, said scientists who spoke on condition of anonymity because they are not allowed to publicly refer to any countries by name.
The scientists and country representatives who had flocked here this week to participate in negotiations on the final wording applauded as the panel’s chairman, Rajendra Pachauri, declared the panel’s years of work concluded, just after 10:30 p.m. on Friday.
Even though the synthesis report is more alarming than its predecessors, some researchers believe that it still understates the trajectory of global warming and its impact. The I.P.C.C.’s scientific process, which takes five years of study and writing from start to finish, cannot take into account the very latest data on climate change or economic trends, which show larger than predicted development and energy use in China.
“The world is already at or above the worst case scenarios in terms of emissions,” said Gernot Klepper, of the Kiel Institute for World Economy in Kiel, Germany. “In terms of emissions, we are moving past the most pessimistic estimates of the I.P.C.C., and by some estimates we are above that red line.”
The panel presents several scenarios for the trajectory of emissions and climate change. In 2006, 8.4 gigatons of carbon were put into the atmosphere from fossil fuels, according to a study in the proceedings of the National Academy of Science, which was co-written by Dr. Klepper. That is almost identical to the panel’s worst case prediction for that year.
Likewise, a recent International Energy Agency report looking at the unexpectedly rapid emissions growth in China and India estimated that if current policies were not changed the world would warm six degrees by 2030, a disastrous increase far higher than the panel’s estimates of one to four degrees by the end of the century.
While the United States, Saudi Arabia and China tried to change the text in order to play down the consequences of global warming, developing nations — which will bear the initial brunt of climate change — were much more forceful than at previous meetings in opposing these efforts, one scientist who was in the negotiating room said.
"I suspect that will continue,” he said. “As they feel more and more threatened by the sea and the storms they will insist that, as one of them put it, ‘We do not want this report to be warm and fuzzy when the reality is cold and risky,’ or something like that,” he said.
One novel aspect of the report is a specific list of “Reasons for Concern.” It includes items that are thought to be very likely outgrowths of climate change that had been mentioned in previous reports, like an increase in extreme weather events.
But it for the first time includes less likely but more alarming possibilities, like the relatively rapid melting of polar ice. Previous reports focused more on changes the scientists felt were “highly likely.”
“This time, they take a step back and look at the totality,” Dr. Verolme said. “Saying it is less likely to occur, but if it does we are fried.”
One such area is the future melting of ice sheets in Greenland and western Antarctica. In earlier reports, the panel’s scientists acknowledged that their computer models were poor at such predictions, and did not reflect the rapid melting that scientists have recently observed. If these areas melt entirely, seas would rise 40 feet, scientists said. While scientists are certain that the sheets will melt over millennia, producing sea-level rises, there is now evidence to suggest that it could happen much faster than this, perhaps over centuries.
“In my view that would make it not just difficult, but impossible to adapt successfully, some of my colleagues would say catastrophic,” said Dr. Oppenheimer. “If they say that it’s possible that melting could occur in centuries leading to meters of change, that’s a headline.”
This final report also puts more emphasis on the ripple effect of small degrees of temperature change, some of which are already being seen, such as species extinctions and loss of biodiversity.
“A relatively modest degree of warming — one to three degrees — spells a lot of trouble and I think that was not clear in the previous report,” Dr. Oppenheimer said. He said part of the reason for the lack of clarity was that governments had “messed around” with the language and structure of the report during the approval process.
This time around, the consequences of different degrees of climate change will be better laid out so that the ministers who meet in Bali next month will understand the options and the consequences of inaction. “This should light a fire under policy makers,” Dr. Oppenheimer said.
14/11/07, Climate change panel too slow to react?, (Back).
Diplomacy and peer reviews make for reports that can lag the science.
VALENCIA, Spain - They are seen as the gurus of global warming, and their reports are accepted almost as the gospel of climate science. Esteem for the panel of scientists was immortalized when it shared this year's Nobel Peace prize.
But experts and the scientists themselves acknowledge the reports are conservative and have a poor track record of predictions.
As the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change meets in this Mediterranean coastal city to finish its fourth report in two decades, it must decide whether it will produce a fifth.
"Next year would complete 20 years of the IPCC," said chairman Rajendra Pachauri. "That clearly is a point where we should carry out deep and detailed introspection on what we have achieved, what we could have achieved further, and how we might be able to ensure achievement in the future."
The future of the panel, which shared the Nobel with former Vice President Al Gore, is an agenda item at the weeklong meeting that wraps up Saturday with the release of its latest climate change assessment.
The panel, a loose organization of more than 2,000 scientists who submit their own research and review the work of others, has issued extensive reports on global warming every five or six years since it was created under the auspices of two U.N. bodies. Each report includes a brief Summary for Policymakers, which is approved by government representatives.
Driven by peer reviews
The assessment reports have won accolades as the most authoritative compilation of climate science available, largely because of the rigorous process of peer review. Even if the data produced by different researchers may conflict, the science is deemed to be solid.
But its thoroughness is also a shackle that condemns it to lag behind the latest research. It usually takes the collaborative efforts of dozens of IPCC authors about two years to compile a report and takes at least a year for a scientific paper to be reviewed.
In its assessment this year, the IPCC has reported with near certainty that human activity is causing temperatures to rise and changing weather patterns. Sea levels are rising, storms are growing more fierce, deserts are spreading and glaciers are melting, it said. The panel predicts that millions of poor people will suffer from hunger, thirst, floods and disease unless drastic action is taken. But it also says the tools are available, or soon will be, to greatly slow global warming, soften the impact and help nations adapt to changing conditions.
As grim as that may look, the reality may be much worse.
"We need to understand that the worst impacts in the report may not in fact be the worst that will happen, or the worst that appear possible," said Peter Altman, the climate policy project manager for the National Environmental Trust, a Washington lobby.
"What's in the report now is scary enough. But in most of the predictions the IPCC has made, just about everything is happening faster and more intensely than we thought," he said. "This issue is not being overstated. If anything, it is being understated."
Think tanks cite shortfall
A joint report this month by two U.S. security institutes said they compared predictions of climate change by the panel and other researchers in the last two decades with changes that actually occurred, and found the scientists had consistently fallen short.
Part of the reason was the lack of data, but it also could be that the scientists shied away from controversy and wanted to avoid being discredited as "alarmists," said the paper by the Center for Strategic International Studies and the Center for a New American Security.
The scientists see their caution as a strength rather than a shortcoming.
"The process tends to lead to a fairly conservative outcome," said Bert Metz, one of the IPCC's lead authors, because the scientists will wait for verification of research before pronouncing a possible trend.
"By not using an alarmist or advocatist tone, you in the end gain much more credibility," said Metz, of the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency.
The World Wide Fund for Nature, or WWF International, which is invited with other environmental groups to observe IPCC meetings, agrees the IPCC process is cumbersome and late.
"Climate change is going faster than our worst-case scenarios of five or six years ago," said WWF's climate specialist Hans Verolme.
Still, he said, it would be difficult for the panel to issue more frequent reports to try to keep pace with the research without sacrificing its scientific integrity. "I wouldn't know how to speed up the process," he said.
16/11/07, Andrew C. Revkin, A 4th Climate Warning. Anyone Listening?, (Back).
It was the culmination of an extraordinary meeting on the human-changed atmosphere. For three days, scientists had described how a buildup of long-lived gases emitted by burning fuels and forests would, if it continued, raise temperatures, raise seas and disrupt weather patterns important to agriculture, water supplies and wildlife.
As the conference concluded, a leader of the group, Michael McElroy of Harvard, stood and said this: “If we choose to take on this challenge, it appears that we can slow the rate of change substantially, giving us time to develop mechanisms so that the cost to society and the damage to ecosystems can be minimized. We could alternatively close our eyes, hope for the best, and pay the cost when the bill comes due.”
That was June 1988. Dr. McElroy’s statement was the kicker on my first long story on global warming, which ran on the cover of Discover magazine a few months later.
That year also saw the birth of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Tonight in Valencia, Spain, the panel completed the final summary section of its latest review of what is known, possible and still a mystery about how human activities are influencing Earth’s climate and what we might do about it.
This was the fourth such review since 1990. Progressively over that span, the panel’s reports have raised the likelihood that people, mainly by burning billions of tons of coal and oil, have been the main force responsible for global warming since 1950 and that a lot more warming, coastal retreats and shifting weather are in the offing under business as usual. (In the bargain we get some plankton-harming ocean acidification, something not anticipated originally).
The rituals surrounding the release of these reports have always been the same. Around 10:30 p.m. local time on Friday in Valencia, according to my colleague Elisabeth Rosenthal, applause rang out when Rajendra K. Pachauri, the chairman of the panel, declared the fourth assessment completed after government officials approved the wording in a final concluding document. (There’ll be more applause in early December in Oslo when he and others snag half of the Nobel Peace Prize for nearly 20 years of painstaking, unpaid, exhausting, contentious work.)
As they always have, news services began describing the embargoed findings earlier in the evening, prodded by environmental campaigners and some scientists who hoped the results would inspire diplomats preparing to gather next month in Bali for the latest round of climate-treaty talks. Industry-backed groups issued their own news releases playing down the notion that new climate perils had been identified.
On Saturday governments will issue formal statements, each seeking to spin the findings to suit its own agenda and needs.
But the central question remains largely as it was posed by Dr. McElroy 19 years ago: Will the world’s leaders and citizens act on the basis of this building picture of a world sent into environmental flux by human actions, or choose to wait for some future round of research to clarify things a bit more?
In the meantime, the world is heading toward nine billion people, all seeking comfort and security and prosperity. A broad range of experts, within and outside the I.P.C.C., agree that sufficient energy to enable such progress (without overheating Earth) will come only with a mix of more efficient use of fossil fuels and fundamentally new energy technologies that do not influence the climate.
In essence, this challenge reflects a question I posed on Nov. 9, in a post called “What Does the Present Owe the Future“? As you can see from reader comments, there is no easy answer.
Many of the scientists involved with this marathon effort have spent more than half their lives trying to clarify what may come from what Roger Revelle, in an understated line, described in a 1957 paper as a “large scale geophysical experiment.”
In an e-mail exchange during a break in the proceedings today, Stephen H. Schneider, a Stanford University climatologist who has been in the climatology trenches since long before I quoted him in that 1988 article, put it this way (while declining to discuss the still-embargoed report): “The world learns slowly, so we keep moving forward haltingly, with backsliding, and do the best we can.”
(Back)
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