No Time to Put Climate Science on Ice
Achim Steiner
NAIROBI – The science of climate change has been on the defensive in recent weeks, owing to an error that dramatically overstated the rate at which the Himalayan glaciers could disappear. Some in the media, and those who are skeptical about climate change, are currently having a field day, parsing every comma and cough in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) 2007 assessment.
Some strident voices are even dismissing climate change as a hoax on a par with the Y2K computer bug. As a result, the public has become increasingly bewildered as the unremitting questioning of the IPCC and its chair assumes almost witch-hunting proportions in some quarters.
The time has really come for a reality check. It is quite right to pinpoint errors, make corrections, and check and re-check sources for accuracy and credibility. It is also right that the IPCC has acknowledged the need for ever more stringent and transparent quality-control procedures to minimize any such risks in future reports.
But let us also put aside the myth that the science of climate change is holed below the water line and is sinking fast on a sea of falsehoods.
Over the course of 22 years, the IPCC has drawn upon the expertise of thousands of the best scientific minds, nominated by their own governments, in order to make sense of the complexity of unfolding environmental events and their potential impacts on economies and societies. The Panel has striven to deliver the “perfect” product in terms of its mandate, scientific rigor, peer review, and openness, and has brought forward the knowledge – but also the knowledge gaps – in terms of our understanding of global warming.
Its 2007 report represents the best possible risk assessment available, notwithstanding an error – or, more precisely, a typographical error – in its statement of Himalayan glacial melt rates.
One notion promulgated in recent weeks is that the IPCC is sensationalist: this is perhaps the most astonishing, if not risible claim of all. Indeed, the Panel has more often been criticized for being far too conservative in its projections of, for example, the likely sea-level rise in the twenty-first century. Indeed, caution rather than sensation has been the Panel’s watchword throughout its existence.
In its first assessment, in 1990, the IPCC commented that observed temperature increases were “broadly consistent with predictions of climate models, but it is also of the same magnitude as natural climate variability.” The second assessment, in 1995, said: “Results indicate that the observed trend in global mean temperature over the past 100 years is unlikely to be entirely natural in origin.”
In 2001, its third assessment reported: “There is new and stronger evidence that most of the warming observed over the last 50 years is attributable to human activities.” By 2007, the consensus had reached “very high confidence” – at least a 90% chance of being correct – in scientists’ understanding of how human activities are causing the world to become warmer.
This does not sound like a partial or proselytizing body, but one that has striven to assemble, order, and make sense of a rapidly evolving scientific puzzle for which new pieces emerge almost daily while others remain to be found. So perhaps the real issue that is being overlooked is this: confronted by the growing realization that humanity has become a significant driver of changes to our planet, the IPCC, since its inception, has been in a race against time.
The overwhelming evidence now indicates that greenhouse-gas emissions need to peak within the next decade if we are to have any reasonable chance of keeping the global rise in temperature down to manageable levels. Any delay may generate environmental and economic risks of a magnitude that proves impossible to handle.
The fact is that the world would have to make a transition to a low-carbon, resource-efficient future even if there were no climate change. With the world’s human population set to rise from six billion to nine billion people in the next half-century, we need to improve management of our atmosphere, air, lands, soils, and oceans anyway.
Rather than undermine the IPCC’s work, we should renew and re-double our efforts to support its mammoth task in assembling the science and knowledge for its fifth assessment in 2014. What is needed is an urgent international response to the multiple challenges of energy security, air pollution, natural-resource management, and climate change.
The IPCC is as fallible as the human beings that comprise it. But it remains without doubt the best and most solid foundation we have for a community of more than 190 nations to make these most critical current and future global choices.
Achim Steiner is Executive Director of the United Nations Environment Program, which co-hosts the IPCC.
Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2010.
www.project-syndicate.org
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wauch 02:00 19 Feb 10
look the fact is that Americans across the board are and will continue to look for excuses NOT to do anything about anything having to do with climate change or biodiversity. This IPCC slip up is just the lates in a long line of bailouts handed to the apathetic in this country. The IPCC made a legitimate mistake and deserve to be called out for that, but to dismiss their tenure for this is a prime example of what I am talking about.
adrianvance 05:09 04 Mar 10
CO2 is a trace gas in the atmosphere and insignificant by definition. Water vapor is the principle "greenhouse gas." It is seven times better at capturing IR energy from sunlight and has 200 times as many molecules for 1400 times the effect! Or you can say, "Water vapor is responsible for 99.99% of all atmospheric heating.
Carbon is 84% of all petroleum. Control and taxing of carbon is the key to more political and economic power than anything since the signing of the Magna Carta, hence the lie of "anthropogenic global warming."
Glaciers come and go. Ice melts and freezes. Earth does not have one temperature, but many in an ever-changing dance of the elements, energies and eccentricities of the universe. Warmer eras were Edens before the Al Gores of the world came along yelling, "The sky is falling!" Sober up, Greens. You lost.
JeandeBegles 11:59 09 Apr 10
To adrianvance.
What are your credentials to stand against the community of the experts of IPCC? have you any piece of evidence backing your point of view?
You are right to notice that CO2 is present as "traces" in the atmosphere. That is the very reason that our human activity has a huge impact on these traces. CO2 concentration has been under 280 ppm for more than 1 million of years, and now it is at 387 ppm.
Please get informed and stop publishing these blabant errors that confuse the common will needed to act now.
adrianvance 03:13 09 Apr 10
To Jeandebeagles:
I was a Chem major undergrad and did grad in biology, but did not finish a Ph.D. Nonetheless, I spent 50 years in educational publishing writing and producing educational materials for the schools until liberals took over.
I am not the issue, the facts are and of the 2500 IPCC members only 62 were scientists, 12 of whom resigned in protest asking that their names be removed from the report and they were not.
If you examine the absorption spectra, analyze the atmosphere in terms of moles of gas, sum the absorbed energies in terma of E = (c X h)/w where E is energy, c is the speed of light, h is Planks constant and w is wavelength, finally summing the energies absorbed for water vapor and CO2 you will see that CO2 is utterly insignificant in the system, i.e. absobing 0.1% of the energy heating the atmosphere. And, according to Woodwell (Scientific Amrican, Jan. 1978) of the 166 gigatons of CO2 produced by Earth annually only 6 comes from man and of that we make 20% or 0.72% so cutting our contribution by 80% per IPCC only reduces world CO2 by 0.58% and 250 million people starve to death in America while billions starve in the world!
This whole scheme is done for money; more taxes and bigger grants because James Hansen and Al Gore are too stupid to realize you cannot ride a dead horse.
Nico 02:42 06 Feb 10
Indeed, I worry about a Republican majority in the 2010 legislative elections, if not a majority, a sizeale minority that could scuddle any plans to deal with climate change--assuming that already didn't happen with the loss of the Mass. seat. Republicans today represent a anti-science, pro-eschatology wing of American society that simply doesn't believe in "science", as if it were a conscious political program to delegitimize the Bible. Not only that, but many are bought by the oil/gas/coal industries that have no interest in propagating the "climate change" line, unless they can articulate it for their own profitable-interests, i.e. "clean coal". As Glenn Beck said, he doesn't want to live "like an Indian", he wants to live "like an American", but since we all know that is environmentally, and socially unsustainable, something has got to give and I fear that may be the Earth.
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