Nature Features
IPCC hopes final report will be manual for tackling warming
Nov 16, 2007, 11:42 GMT
Washington/Valencia, Spain - One month after being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is at it again, this time trying to boil down the wealth of information on climate change into one easy-to-read manual for policymakers.
The so-called 'synthesis' report of the IPCC, being released in Valencia, Spain on Saturday, is essentially a summary of three previous IPCC reports released in the spring, which sounded alarm bells that global warming was an 'unequivocal,' man-made phenomenon that needed urgent attention.
The task before government negotiators and researchers meeting in Valencia this week was a mammoth one: Take some 15,000 pages - compiled with the help of more than 2,000 scientists from around the world - and cut them to about 10.
That means every sentence takes on a new significance. For example, should the synthesis report focus on pre-2000 greenhouse-gas emissions blamed for global warming, which would spotlight Europe and the United States, or on post-2000 emissions for which developing countries like China and India have a greater responsibility.
The process has been painstaking and slow, with negotiators often haggling over individual words, said Greenpeace spokeswoman Gabriela von Goerne. The United States and other major polluters have been accused of trying to water down the final document.
The stakes are high, even if there is nothing essentially new in the IPCC's final report. That is because the UN-backed panel hopes its summary will act as a road-map on how to tackle climate change - prioritizing the more important lessons of previous reports - ahead of a crucial summit on the issue in Bali, Indonesia in December.
'The report is really a how-to guide. It will be viewed by all as the definitive report on the science and the impacts of climate change to date,' US Senator John Kerry, who will be leading a US congressional delegation to Bali, told reporters in a conference call Thursday. 'It is the blueprint for the Bali talks in December.'
Bali will serve as the culmination of what has been a banner year for the climate change movement - a fact the IPCC reports had no small part in promoting. Regional summits from Asia to the G-8 industrial nations to Latin America put tackling global warming at the heart of their agenda. The United Nations in September hosted an unprecedented one-day summit of world leaders on the topic.
Yet the Bali meeting is about the future - it kicks off the process of finding a global agreement that could replace the Kyoto Protocol. Kyoto for the first time placed limits on the greenhouse gas emissions of industrial nations, but was not signed onto by the United States. The treaty expires in 2012.
The IPCC and its head, Rajendra Pachauri, received a Nobel Peace Prize this year, along with former US vice president Al Gore, for raising awareness of the issue of climate change.
The first three IPCC reports each highlighted a different aspect of climate change: the science, the consequences - existing and future - and what can be done to stop it. Dr Kristie Ebi, who was a lead author of an IPCC chapter on human health, said the goal of the synthesis report is to clarify the 'links' between all three aspects.
Environmentalists say the IPCC's final gambit of the year drums home two key messages ahead of the Bali conference.
'First and most important, the (report) flatly says in its opening, evidence of warming today is unequivocal. There is no further question about the science and human causation of global warming,' said Philip Clapp, president of the National Environmental Trust, a US environmental action group.
The second message, said Clapp: 'This is no longer an environmental issue ... this is now a rapidly developing human disaster.'
© 2007 dpa - Deutsche Presse-AgenturCOMMENT
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From New Scientist, May 2007 -
There have been claims that warming on Mars and Pluto are proof that the recent warming on Earth is caused by an increase in solar activity, and not by greenhouses gases. But we can say with certainty that, even if Mars, Pluto or any other planets have warmed in recent years, it is not due to changes in solar activity.
The Sun's energy output has not increased since direct measurements began in 1978 If increased solar output really was responsible, we should be seeing warming on all the planets and their moons, not just Mars and Pluto.
Our solar system has eight planets, three dwarf planets and quite a few moons with at least a rudimentary atmosphere, and thus a climate of sorts. Their climates will be affected by local factors such as orbital variations, changes in reflectance (albedo) and even volcanic eruptions, so it would not be surprising if several planets and moons turn out to be warming at any one time.
However, given that a year on Mars is nearly two Earth years long, and that a year on Pluto lasts for 248 Earth years, it is rather early to start drawing conclusions about long-term climate trends on the outer bodies of the Solar System.
What do we know? Images of Mars suggest that between 1999 and 2005, some of the frozen carbon dioxide that covers the south polar region turned into gas (sublimated). This may be the result of the whole planet warming
One theory is that winds have recently swept some areas of Mars clean of dust, darkening the surface, warming the Red Planet and leading to further increases in windiness – a positive feedback effect.
There is a great deal of uncertainty, though. The warming could be a regional effect. And recent results from the thermal imaging system on the Mars Odyssey probe suggest that the polar cap is not shrinking at all, but varies greatly from one Martian year to the next, although the details have yet to be published.
Observations of the thickness of Pluto's atmosphere in 2002 suggested the dwarf planet was warming even as its orbit took it further from the Sun. The finding baffled astronomers at the time, and the cause has yet to be determined.
It has since been suggested that this is due to a greenhouse effect: as it gets closer to the sun Pluto may warm enough for some of the methane ice on its surface to turn into a gas. This would cause further warming, which would continue for a while even after Pluto's orbit starts to take it away from the Sun.
The world's problems are so large and complex that no government or governments in political concert with each other can now solve them. There is only one thing that will provide the means and solution for humankind to survive past this present century, the ORE-STEM Complex and its global interlinked Satellite Incubator Centres. For if the leading scientific minds in the world in concert cannot do this, no politician or others can. It is as simple as that. The problem is of course that politicians will not listen to the independent mind and voice. They only listen to themselves and their so-called informed advisers, but where this thinking has been found totally wrong time and time again. For just one instance amongst countless is when the chief scientific adviser to the PM in the United Kingdom in WW2 stated to the prime minister that the Germans had not the technology to produce a flying bomb. But where only two months later they were reigning down on the UK. This time though, the destructive force of nature will be reigning down on us and will do its worst. But as always it has to be said, it will be the people who ultimately suffer and not the politicians or their astute advisers. Mark my words, politicians will do relatively nothing to stem what has now been put in motion by the powerful in industry and politics in return for a quick to medium term financial return and no other. Destroying the planet in the name of self-interest is a crime against humanity and it should be seen that way.
Therefore people will have to come to the reasoning, sooner or later, that the ORE-STEM complex, thought out by some of the foremost scientific minds (the late and great US scientist Dr. Glenn Seaborg included who was the major thinker on the matter – Element 106 Seaborgium) is the only answer. For to stop the now ever-growing human destructive juggernaut in its tracks, only something of an immense undertaking of an equal magnitude will do this. The sooner politicians and industrialists realize this, the sooner the world may have a chance to prevent what is on the horizon for humankind.
Dr David Hill
World Innovation Foundation
Bern, Switzerland
www.thewif.org.uk
Ps. Note that Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the IPCC is one of the World Innovation Foundation's newest Honorary Consulting Members. There are now nearly 3,500 Global Consultant Fellows and Honorary Members of the WIF who see a new way forward for the world-at-large and a strategy for Survival in the long-term where the sustainability of the human existence is their primary objective.
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NoharnessNov 16th, 2007 - 12:45:11
'First and most important, the (report) flatly says in its opening, evidence of warming today is unequivocal. There is no further question about the science and human causation of global warming,' said Philip Clapp, president of the National Environmental Trust, a US environmental action group.'
This is about as wrong as it can get, but since when did right hold sway against wrong in politics? From this arises a question. Who will bell the cat? Will a Chinese or Indian refusal to comply with IPCC demands constitute a causus belli? Will the EU launch an attack upon the US if this foolishness is rejected here?
The IPCC did not and does not deserve the Nobel Prize. This is nothing more than a grab for power by the bureaucrats at the UN.
First, the IPCC flatly refused to addressed the effects of water vapor in the atmosphere, even though water vapor is hundreds of times more effective than carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas and despite the fact that there is twenty-six times more water vapor in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide. Secondly, the IPCC dismisses with a wave of the hand the fact that it is not just Earth that is experiencing an increase in warmth. The entire solar system is warming up.
www.space.com/scienceastronomy/mars_ice-age_031208.html
web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2002/pluto.html
news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/120259.stm
www.space.com/scienceastronomy/060504_red_jr.html
Mister Clapp and his colleagues are behaving like misanthropes rather than humanitarians.
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