Archive for the 'IPCC' Category

As mentioned in yesterday’s article, the report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) wasn’t exactly breaking news. There have been an abundance of scientists and journal articles saying the same thing for a while now. The IPCC is simply a review body that has actually been criticized for being too conservative in its concerns over global warming.

As the scientific community comes to an even great consensus on the issue of global warming, a section of Al Gore’s book and movie An Inconvenient Truth comes to mind.

When discussing the scientific consenus, Gore quotes Jim Baker, the former head of NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration): “There is a better scientific consensus on this issue than any other…with the possible exception of Newton’s Law of Dynamics.”

Gore goes onto to discuss a peer-reviewed Science magazine study published by Dr. Naomi Oreskes at the University of California at San Diego where all 928 of the peer-reviewed science journal articles on global warming published between 1993 and 2003 were analyzed. Dr. Oreskes and her team choose a large random sample and determined if these papers agreed on the scientific consensus on global warming.

Percentage of articles in doubt as to the cause of global warming: 0%

Then it gets interesting:

Due to well-funded special interest groups, a very coordinated disinformation campaign is being conducted to raise doubt about global warming. (Big surprise: these groups happen to receive funding from the oil and coal industry). Pulitzer Prize-winning author Ross Gelbspan wrote a book called Boiling Point and discussed this information campaign. In this book, he describes an internal memo from one of these groups that stated their goal was to “reposition global warming as theory, rather than fact.”

Al Gore then proceeded to draw a compelling comparison to the reaction of the tobacco industry in the 1960s when the Surgeon General released a landmark report linking cigarette smoke to lung cancer.

“Doubt is our product, since it is the best means of competing with the ‘body of fact’ that exists in the mind of the general public. It is also the means of establishing a controversy.” – Brown and Williamson Tobacco Company memo from the 1960s.

Then it gets really interesting:

Similar to the study of the peer-reviewed journal articles, another study was done of the mainstream media coverage of the global warming issue. No formal citation was given for this story, but as avid news reader I have zero doubts about the study’s conclusion.

They studied articles in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the LA Times, and the Wall Street Journal over 14 years (roughly 1990-2004). They took a 18% sample of the 636 articles and analyzed how they depicted the global warming issue.

Number of articles that gave equal weight to the “scientific articles” (translation: not peer-reviewed) that claim global warming isn’t due to human activity: 53%

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Posted by Tim Roth, author of the political blog Think Anew and Act Anew

“Friday, 2 February 2007 may go down in history as the day when the question mark was removed from the question of whether climate change has anything to do with human activities” — Achim Steiner, Executive Director of the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) [1]

In an important report published yesterday in Paris, France the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) declared that human are “very likely” a cause of global warming. While this isn’t exactly breaking news, what is significant is that in a 2001 report the IPCC said humans are “likely” a cause of global warming. In more concrete terms, the IPCC definition for likely is a 66-90% probability. This means the probabilty of a human effect is now greater than 90%. [2]

Another interesting paragraph of the IPCC Executive Summary read the following:
“The observed widespread warming of the atmosphere and ocean, together with ice mass loss, support the conclusion that it is extremely unlikely that global climate change of the past fifty years can be explained without external forcing, and very likely that it is not due to known natural causes alone.” [3]

Other highlights from the IPCC report:
1. By the end of the century, temperatures will probably rise 1.8-4C (3.2-7.2F) and could possible rise between 1.1-6.4C (2-11.5F)
2. Sea level likely to go up by 28-43 cm (11-16 inches)
3. By the second half of the century, Arctic sea ice will disappear entirely during the summer months.
4. Eleven of the last 12 years are some of the warmest on record
5. Changes in weather patterns will lead to longer and more intense droughts, heatwaves, and tropical storms.

The IPCC will release a full report later this year and will release reports on how to adapt to climate change and suggestions towards reducing greenhouse gases. Stay tuned for more updates.

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Posted by Tim Roth, author of the political blog Think Anew and Act Anew

Sources:
1. “Analysis: Through the climate window” by Richard Black, BBC News
2. “Humans blamed for climate change” by Richard Black, BBC News
3. IPCC report (PDF), released on February 2, 2007