Nobel Prize Winning IPCC Panel Worried About Temperature Increases....Please Watch IPCC Video

Scientists are concerned it will be difficult to stay below the 2 degrees Celsius limit

 

The latest update on the state of the world's climate will be released on Friday in Stockholm, Sweden. Scientists and government officials from 195 countries have been meeting all week ahead of the publication from the UN-sponsored Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The report will detail the physical evidence behind global warming. Delegates were discussing late into the night on Thursday the final wording of a summary for policymakers.

 

What is the IPCC?

In its own words, the IPCC is there "to provide the world with a clear scientific view on the current state of knowledge in climate change and its potential environmental and socio-economic impacts".

The offspring of two UN bodies, the World Meteorological Organization and the United Nations Environment Program, it has issued four heavyweight assessment reports to date on the state of the climate.

These are commissioned by the governments of 195 countries, essentially the entire world. These reports are critical in informing the climate policies adopted by these governments. The IPCC itself is a small organization, run from Geneva with a full time staff of 12. All the scientists who are involved with it do so on a voluntary basis.

Drafts of this dense, complex document indicate that scientists are more convinced than ever that the planet is warming and that humans are responsible for the majority of it, especially over the past 50 years. This message is likely to be backed up by improved observations of changes in polar ice, sea level and temperature.

Prof Jean Pascal van Ypersele, the vice-chairman of the IPCC, emphasized that the panel's statements were robust, and raised the concern that the target of staying below a 2 degrees Celsius rise in global temperatures was becoming increasingly difficult to attain.

"Any reasonable scientist has to be more worried if they have to answer the question of how to stabilize climate to a level of warming that is not considered dangerous by policymakers."

Politicians made a decision in 2009 at the Copenhagen climate conference to try to limit long-term global average temperature increases to 2C. This, it was said, was the point above which dangerous changes to the planet would occur. Prof van Ypersele said the world passed a significant milestone on the road to a 2 degrees Celsius rise when the concentration in the atmosphere of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide went through the 400 parts per million mark last May.

"That number is a measure of the duvet we have around the Earth. As long as its thickness is increasing, I don't see how we can't be worried that it will become more and more difficult to achieve any stabilization target," he said.

Taking place in a former brewery, the talks were said to be making slow progress but delegates expressed optimism that the summary document would be published on time on Friday.

2007 IPCC Report...Please Watch 
 

 

 

 Dec 9, 2007

The IPCC report came as environment ministers prepared for the December-2007 Bali talks, where they were asked to agree to a two-year 'roadmap' of negotiations for accelerating cuts in greenhouse gases.
On current trends, it says, surging emissions of greenhouse gases will relentlessly warm earth's atmosphere, damaging ice and snow cover and causing the oceans to expand and thus rise. The impacts could be "abrupt or irreversible".
In such a scenario, humans would face wide-ranging misery in the form of crop failure, storm damage and ill health as drought, floods, cyclones, mosquito pests and water-borne disease would become more frequent or intensive. It's time for all of us to care about the future of our planet.
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