Hold On To Your Warming Seats: New IPCC Report Out Tomorrow

[Valin]

Via Meadia:

9/26/13

 

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) will release a draft summary early tomorrow morning that aims to encapsulate our current understanding of climate and our relationship with it. Greens, policymakers, and green policymakers all over the world will be paying close attention to this summary, because it represents the clearest communication from the scientific community to national and international leaders regarding global warming.

 

At the heart of it, humanitys relationship is, as US Department of Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz put it, simple: greenhouse gases make the earth warmer, and we are emitting more and more of them into the atmosphere. But those two statements arent enough for policymakers to bet their political futures on. We need to know more: How sensitive is our climate to greenhouse gases? How much can we expect temperatures to rise? What are the costs of doing nothing? What are the costs of cutting out emissions altogether?

 

The IPCCs new report wont answer all of these questions. Some of them fall outside the purview of science, and some remain, frustratingly, beyond our understanding. But the panel has been meeting in Stockholm this week, diligently ironing out a consensus.

 

(Snip)