IPCC Climate Report 2013: An Ultimate Warning?

The Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC) released merely one part of its six-yearly report last month, and alarm bells have begun ringing across the world: apparently, it is 95% certain humans have been the largest contributing factor to global warming since the 1950’s. A general overview of the key facts and figures is a must for digesting what this report actually 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.
• Each of the last three decades has been successively warmer at the Earth’s surface than any preceding decade since 1850. In the Northern Hemisphere, 1983–2012 was likely the warmest 30-year period of the last 1400 years.
• Ocean warming dominates the increase in energy stored in the climate system, accounting for more than 90% of the energy accumulated between 1971 and 2010.
• Over the last two decades, the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets have been losing mass, glaciers have continued to shrink almost worldwide, and Arctic sea ice and Northern Hemisphere spring snow cover have continued to decrease in extent.
• The rate of sea level rise since the mid-19th century has been larger than the mean rate during the previous two millennia (high confidence). Over the period 1901–2010, global mean sea level rose by 0.19m [0.17m to 0.21m].
• The atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide (CO2), methane, and nitrous oxide have increased to levels unprecedented in at least the last 800,000 years. CO2 concentrations have increased by 40% since pre-industrial times, primarily from fossil fuel emissions and secondarily from net land use change emissions. The ocean has absorbed about 30% of the emitted anthropogenic carbon dioxide, causing ocean acidification.
• Global surface temperature change for the end of the 21st century is likely to exceed 1.5°C relative to 1850 to 1900. Warming will continue beyond 2100. Warming will continue to exhibit interannual-to-decadal variability and will not be regionally uniform.

“There’s no happy ending where we prevent climate change any more. Now the question is, is it going to be a miserable century or an impossible one, and what comes after that.” Bill McKibben, The New York Times, Dec. 5, 2010

Such dire forecasts backed by mathematical certainty come as a respite for climate change believers who in recent years had been challenged to explain why global warming rates had been gradually declining in the last decade. Now, their response is to say that “due to natural variability, trends based on short term records are very sensitive to the beginning and end dates and do not, in general, reflect long term trends.” This, backed up by the above facts, could well be indicative of a very real warning regarding our impacts on the Earth’s climate.

So the science has been made clear, but what’s stopping people or even governments from taking combative action? One major factor is the reluctance to take a personal, conscious stake in moulding the climate at the cost of short- and long-term personal comforts, or even at the cost of a political party losing popularity. Another common sentiment is that any human efforts to reverse the anthropogenic impacts would be futile, so there’s no point expending resources to even try to do so.

All these hard statistics indicate that the tide is turning against climate change skeptics in terms of factual evidence. But has it made a difference in terms of motivating them? As inquired by The American Thinker, why should we try to prevent the climate from changing, if it was even caused by us to begin with? Change is the only constant in nature and it could be less complicated and more appealing to corporate interests (and therefore, to politicians and skeptics alike) to invest in adapting our lifestyles to warmer temperatures rather than trying to actually bring the temperature down.

What’s certain is that all of us impact the climate to some extent, whether negligible or not. If you believe we are the dominant cause, how can you go about convincing others of this and what do you think can be feasibly done to address this? If you believe our role is arbitrary, how would you challenge the IPCC report and the adverse impacts on human life that are already beginning to manifest themselves (e.g. more severe natural disasters?) To be continued…

Want to hear more in-depth discussions of the IPCC report from distinguished personalities such as John Vidal, Professor Sir Brian Hoskins, and Dr Chris Brierly? Come along to the London Climate Forum at Imperial College London on 9th November for a panel discussion on this subject and a host of other exciting talks and exhibitions. Early-bird tickets are just £7 for students!

Visit londonclimateforum.org for more details.