guest post by Steve Easterbrook
In October, I trawled through the final draft of this report, which was released at that time:
• Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Climate Change 2013: The Physical Science Basis.
Here’s what I think are its key messages:
- The warming is unequivocal.
- Humans caused the majority of it.
- The warming is largely irreversible.
- Most of the heat is going into the oceans.
- Current rates of ocean acidification are unprecedented.
- We have to choose which future we want very soon.
- To stay below 2°C of warming, the world must become carbon negative.
- To stay below 2°C of warming, most fossil fuels must stay buried in the ground.
I’ll talk about the first of these here, and the rest in future parts—click to get to any part you want. But before I start, a little preamble.
The IPCC was set up in 1988 as a UN intergovernmental body to provide an overview of the science. Its job is to assess what the peer-reviewed science says, in order to inform policymaking, but it is not tasked with making specific policy recommendations. The IPCC and its workings seem to be widely misunderstood in the media. The dwindling group of people who are still in denial about climate change particularly like to indulge in IPCC-bashing, which seems like a classic case of ‘blame the messenger’. The IPCC itself has a very small staff (no more than a dozen or so people). However, the assessment reports are written and reviewed by a very large team of scientists (several thousands), all of whom volunteer their time to work on the reports. The scientists are are organised into three working groups: WG1 focuses on the physical science basis, WG2 focuses on impacts and climate adaptation, and WG3 focuses on how climate mitigation can be achieved.
In October, the WG1 report was released as a final draft, although it was accompanied by bigger media event around the approval of the final wording on the WG1 “Summary for Policymakers”. The final version of the full WG1 report, plus the WG2 and WG3 reports, have come out since then.
I wrote about the WG1 draft in October, but John has solicited this post for Azimuth only now. By now, the draft I’m talking about here has undergone some minor editing/correcting, and some of the figures might have ended up re-drawn. Even so, most of the text is unlikely to have changed, and the major findings can be considered final.
In this post and the parts to come I’ll give my take on the most important findings, along with a key figure to illustrate each.
(1) The warming is unequivocal
The text of the summary for policymakers says:
Warming of the climate system is unequivocal, and since the 1950s, many of the observed changes are unprecedented over decades to millennia. The atmosphere and ocean have warmed, the amounts of snow and ice have diminished, sea level has risen, and the concentrations of greenhouse gases have increased.
(Fig SPM.1) Observed globally averaged combined land and ocean surface temperature anomaly 1850-2012. The top panel shows the annual values; the bottom panel shows decadal means. (Note: Anomalies are relative to the mean of 1961-1990).
Unfortunately, there has been much play in the press around a silly idea that the warming has “paused” in the last decade. If you squint at the last few years of the top graph, you might be able to convince yourself that the temperature has been nearly flat for a few years, but only if you cherry pick your starting date, and use a period that’s too short to count as climate. When you look at it in the context of an entire century and longer, such arguments are clearly just wishful thinking.
The other thing to point out here is that the rate of warming is unprecedented:
With very high confidence, the current rates of CO2, CH4 and N2O rise in atmospheric concentrations and the associated radiative forcing are unprecedented with respect to the highest resolution ice core records of the last 22,000 years
and there is
medium confidence that the rate of change of the observed greenhouse gas rise is also unprecedented compared with the lower resolution records of the past 800,000 years.
In other words, there is nothing in any of the ice core records that is comparable to what we have done to the atmosphere over the last century. The earth has warmed and cooled in the past due to natural cycles, but never anywhere near as fast as modern climate change.
You can download all of Climate Change 2013: The Physical Science Basis here. It’s also available chapter by chapter here:
Chapters
- Introduction
- Observations: Atmosphere and Surface
- Observations: Ocean
- Observations: Cryosphere
- Information from Paleoclimate Archives
- Carbon and Other Biogeochemical Cycles
- Clouds and Aerosols
- Anthropogenic and Natural Radiative Forcing
- Evaluation of Climate Models
- Detection and Attribution of Climate Change: from Global to Regional
- Near-term Climate Change: Projections and Predictability
- Long-term Climate Change: Projections, Commitments and Irreversibility
- Sea Level Change
- Climate Phenomena and their Relevance for Future Regional Climate Change
Azimuth 
I don’t know how IPCC members/Climate scientists still wake up in the morning and go to work knowing no country in the world is doing anything to address the issue. I can only hope they keep working on this.
I think it’s a big exaggeration to say “no country in the world is doing anything to address this issue”. The European Union is doing quite a bit, for example. You can argue they’re not doing enough, and you can argue that they’re exaggerating what they are doing—but I don’t think you can argue they’re not doing anything.
Here is something from their webpage:
Targets up to 2050
EU leaders have committed to transforming Europe into a highly energy-efficient, low carbon economy. The EU has set itself targets for reducing its greenhouse gas emissions progressively up to 2050 and is working successfully towards meeting them.
Under the Kyoto Protocol, the 15 countries that were EU members before 2004 (‘EU-15’) are committed to reducing their collective emissions to 8% below 1990 levels by the years 2008-2012. Emissions monitoring and projections show that the EU-15 is well on track to meet this target. Most Member States that have joined the EU since 2004 also have Kyoto reduction targets of 6% or 8% (5% in Croatia’s case) which they are on course to achieve.
For 2020, the EU has committed to cutting its emissions to 20% below 1990 levels. This commitment is one of the headline targets of the Europe 2020 growth strategy and is being implemented through a package of binding legislation. The EU has offered to increase its emissions reduction to 30% by 2020 if other major emitting countries in the developed and developing worlds commit to undertake their fair share of a global emissions reduction effort.
In the climate and energy policy framework for 2030, the European Commission proposes that the EU set itself a target of reducing emissions to 40% below 1990 levels by 2030.
For 2050, EU leaders have endorsed the objective of reducing Europe’s greenhouse gas emissions by 80-95% compared to 1990 levels as part of efforts by developed countries as a group to reduce their emissions by a similar degree. The European Commission has published a roadmap for building the low-carbon European economy that this will require.
Taking the initiative
EU initiatives to reduce greenhouse gas emissions include:
Other countries are also taking action… though probably not enough.
zaphod wrote: “I don’t know how IPCC members/Climate scientists still wake up in the morning and go to work knowing no country in the world is doing anything to address the issue. I can only hope they keep working on this.”
No doubt there is some action by governments but there’s a feeling here that seems on track, and maybe it would help to clarify it. Is there a set of noncontroversial statements that might help? My attempt: First, no government is free of corruption no matter how many, or all, of the people under a particular governance can be fooled part, or all, of the time. Likewise a clear path to the power that corrupts seems to be generating strong emotions in those who can be fooled into providing the desired political support. Which emotion seems basically to emerge from a proposition expressed in many ways, all basically equivalent to “Believing is necessary and sufficient for knowing.” While on the other hand, even with the technical difficulties in the words “necessary” and “sufficient,” most of us here would agree that “knowing necessarily means believing,” but “believing does not necessarily mean knowing.” Example: Galileo encountered strong emotion when he said the Earth moves around the sun. Today it would be impossible to generate that level of emotion because most of us Know that the Earth moves around the Sun. We are at peace with that because now we Know. It was Believing that generated all the strong emotion (including the belief that Believing means Knowing). Granted, on a different blog all of this might be controversial but I don’t expect it to be controversial here.
To what extent is governmental corruption, and misperception of governmental corruption by the governed, preventing governmental action on climate change? If the political enabler of the corrupted power is “Believing is necessary and sufficient for Knowing” it would be logical that there are powers in the world opposing the correction of this proposition in the minds of people. As a consequence, there may be a feeling that understanding how corruption prevents action on climate change would, unjustly, be of minimal interest to governments. On the question of corruption and climate change, how many scientific studies are being funded?
On the question of governmental spending on military preparedness for war and economic commitment to addressing climate change, have any scientific studies been funded?
It may not be what you’re asking about, but there’s plenty of overlap between military preparedness and preparing for climate change. DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, had a meeting in 2009 to explore geoengineering ideas. The CIA opened The Center on Climate Change and National Security in September 2009. It was closed in November 2012, supposedly due to budgetary constraints… but perhaps actually because it had become a lightning-rod for criticism from Republican senators. When it was closed, a CIA spokesman said “This work is now performed by a dedicated team in an office that looks at a variety of economic and energy security issues affecting the United States.” I think the CIA is not so stupid as to quit paying attention to these issues.
There’s also the Center for Climate and Security:
The Quadrennial Defense Review 2014, put out by US Defense Department, says:
I was with you until this sentence: “In other words, there is nothing in any of the ice core records that is comparable to what we have done to the atmosphere over the last century.” Why not, “comparable to what we’ve seen before”? I believe we’re to blame, but this sentence to me stands out from the rest of your summary as jumping to conclusions…
Daniel wrote:
Steve was just summarizing what he said more precisely in the previous passage:
So, if we want to discuss this, we should consider rates of warming: the current ones, and those observed in ice cores.
“To stay below 2°C of warming”. In the last 100 years, CO2 levels have increased from 280ppm to over 380ppm, which is alleged to be completely responsible for the 1.2°C rise in temperatures we have experienced in that same time frame. Yet the world didn’t come to an end. In fact, no one noticed global warming was occurring until about 25 years or so ago. So what logic/evidence is there that that an additional 0.8°C increase in temperature is something to worry about, if it should happen in the next 50 years?
We’re discussing the WG1 report—the ‘physical science basis’ report. This is not the one that talks about the costs of global warming: that’s the WG2 report. So for the answer to your question, read this:
• Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Climate Change 2014: Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability
or for starters:
• Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Climate Change 2014: Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability: Summary for Policymakers.
I’m hoping to get someone to post an article about this report here; that would be better than having someone write an article-sized reply to your comment.
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