Report offers lens for viewing IPCC’s new climate reports

March 28, 2014
As the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change takes shape, observers might crave a simple way to make sense of the findings.

As the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change takes shape, observers might crave a simple way to make sense of the findings.

The IPCC’s procedures and reports are complex.

Now concluding is the Fifth Assessment’s Working Group 2, which met in Yokohama to study impacts, adaptation, and vulnerability. Last September, Working Group 1 met in Stockholm to review physical science. Working Group 3 will meet in Berlin Apr. 7-11 on mitigation.

Reports of the working groups will underlie a synthesis report to be assembled next October in Copenhagen.

IPCC assessments, the first of which appeared in 1990, yield volumes of scientific arcana, distilled into summaries for policy-makers. They represent a heroic effort to understand an important, frustratingly complicated phenomenon over which science and politics have entangled themselves messily.

Political attention naturally gravitates to the direst warming forecasts in the IPCC’s summaries. Those forecasts are based on computer models.

But another approach exists, notes a report published recently by the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), a London group dedicated to “restoring balance and trust to the climate debate.”

Computer models project temperature increases over the next century of 3°-6° C., writes the author, Michael J. Kelly, a professor in the engineering department of the University of Cambridge. The other approach bases forecasts on examination of empirical data. Scientists favoring that approach, Kelly writes, “predict another century like the last, with a 1° C. warming.”

Models predict an acceleration of warming not observed since a brief period in the late 1970s. So far, data better support empirical forecasts of a cessation of warming followed by a flattening or decline starting about 2000.

If validation of empirically derived forecasts continues, Kelly writes, “within a decade” computer models “will have proven fundamentally incapable of predicting future climates on the scale of decades as a guide to devising the wise human response.”

This is a simple, scientific lens through which to view IPCC assessments. But politics might not tolerate it.

(From the subscriber’s area of www.ogj.com, posted Mar. 28, 2014; author’s e-mail: [email protected])