Bishop Hill Working Group II
Mar 31, 2014 Climate: IPCC Climate: WG2 The Working Group II report is out today and should be available here, although the site appears to be down at the moment.
YOKOHAMA, Japan, 31 March – The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued a report today that says the effects of climate change are already occurring on all continents and across the oceans. The world, in many cases, is ill-prepared for risks from a changing climate. The report also concludes that there are opportunities to respond to such risks, though the risks will be difficult to manage with high levels of warming.
The report, titled Climate Change 2014: Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability, from Working Group II of the IPCC, details the impacts of climate change to date, the future risks from a changing climate, and the opportunities for effective action to reduce risks. A total of 309 coordinating lead authors, lead authors, and review editors, drawn from 70 countries, were selected to produce the report. They enlisted the help of 436 contributing authors, and a total of 1,729 expert and government reviewers.
The report concludes that responding to climate change involves making choices about risks in a changing world. The nature of the risks of climate change is increasingly clear, though climate change will also continue to produce surprises. The report identifies vulnerable people, industries, and ecosystems around the world. It finds that risk from a changing climate comes from vulnerability (lack of preparedness) and exposure (people or assets in harm’s way) overlapping with hazards (triggering climate events or trends). Each of these three components can be a target for smart actions to decrease risk.
“We live in an era of man-made climate change,” said Vicente Barros, Co-Chair of Working Group II. “In many cases, we are not prepared for the climate-related risks that we already face. Investments in better preparation can pay dividends both for the present and for the future.”
Adaptation to reduce the risks from a changing climate is now starting to occur, but with a stronger focus on reacting to past events than on preparing for a changing future, according to Chris Field, Co-Chair of Working Group II.
“Climate-change adaptation is not an exotic agenda that has never been tried. Governments, firms, and communities around the world are building experience with adaptation,” Field said. “This experience forms a starting point for bolder, more ambitious adaptations that will be important as climate and society continue to change.”
Future risks from a changing climate depend strongly on the amount of future climate change. Increasing magnitudes of warming increase the likelihood of severe and pervasive impacts that may be surprising or irreversible.
“With high levels of warming that result from continued growth in greenhouse gas emissions, risks will be challenging to manage, and even serious, sustained investments in adaptation will face limits,” said Field.
Observed impacts of climate change have already affected agriculture, human health, ecosystems on land and in the oceans, water supplies, and some people’s livelihoods. The striking feature of observed impacts is that they are occurring from the tropics to the poles, from small islands to large continents, and from the wealthiest countries to the poorest.
“The report concludes that people, societies, and ecosystems are vulnerable around the world, but with different vulnerability in different places. Climate change often interacts with other stresses to increase risk,” Field said.
Adaptation can play a key role in decreasing these risks, Barros noted. “Part of the reason adaptation is so important is that the world faces a host of risks from climate change already baked into the climate system, due to past emissions and existing infrastructure,” said Barros.
Field added: “Understanding that climate change is a challenge in managing risk opens a wide range of opportunities for integrating adaptation with economic and social development and with initiatives to limit future warming. We definitely face challenges, but understanding those challenges and tackling them creatively can make climate-change adaptation an important way to help build a more vibrant world in the near-term and beyond.”
Rajendra Pachauri, Chair of the IPCC, said: “The Working Group II report is another important step forward in our understanding of how to reduce and manage the risks of climate change. Along with the reports from Working Group I and Working Group III, it provides a conceptual map of not only the essential features of the climate challenge but the options for solutions.”
The Working Group I report was released in September 2013, and the Working Group III report will be released in April 2014. The IPCC Fifth Assessment Report cycle concludes with the publication of its Synthesis Report in October 2014.
“None of this would be possible without the dedication of the Co-Chairs of Working Group II and the hundreds of scientists and experts who volunteered their time to produce this report, as well as the more than 1,700 expert reviewers worldwide who contributed their invaluable oversight,” Pachauri said. “The IPCC’s reports are some of the most ambitious scientific undertakings in human history, and I am humbled by and grateful for the contributions of everyone who make them possible."
Working Group II is not really my stamping ground, so I don't have a huge amount to say at this stage. I will watch with interest to see how much airtime the UK's pre-eminent environmental economist (and IPCC coordinating lead author) Richard Tol gets today.
Bishop Hill
The appearances by Richard Tol and Chris Field on the Today programme are worth listening to.
Reader Comments (104)
Harold W
Sounds as though the statement was garbled in transmission. Where would we find the original text? Could he have meant that continuwd emissios at this rate are ommitting ourselves to an extra 0.4C by a particular date, such as 2050?
I found the graphs for Krasting et al here.
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/10.1002/(ISSN)1944-8007/earlyview
Look about halfway through the list. From an 1880 start, at 10gtC/year from now on, they are predicting +1.3C and 600ppm for 2050. TCRE around 0.85.
Towards the conservative side, but not extreme. Mildly good news if they are right.
Apr 1, 2014 at 11:16 PM | Richard Betts
Richard, I doubt that many here will require any encouragement to read the report - or take anyone's word for anything. Particularly if a claim is purported and/or reported to derive from an IPCC Assessment Report.
That being said - in light of your takeaway from AR5 WGII's contribution, I am beginning to wonder if you and Pachauri (amongst far too many others) have been reading the same SPM and/or AR.
If the Guardian's Suzanne Goldenberg is to be believed (considering her past performances, a somewhat dubious prospect at best, I agree) then you couldn't possibly have been reading the same report.
And as if that weren't enough, the WMO and (its head honcho) Michel Jarraud have been running around over-hyping the extreme memes and decreeing that "There is no pause" - along with reinforcing but meaningless inanities such as [Shameless plug alert]:
NEWSFLASH: “Climate change is not stopping”, says WMO chief
Not to mention the "snoball" tick-tick, boom-boom, doom-doom AR5 "Movies" - or your very own history of tweets and/or blog nit-picking at the GWPF, Steve McIntyre, and Nic Lewis (amongst others) compared to your deafening silence (or occasional watered-down milquetoast rebukes) regarding the ludicrous - and utterly dishonest - excesses of the likes of Gleick, Mann, Lewandowsky, Cook and Nuccitelli.
As for your recommendation that readers "[trace] the statements back to the underlying chapters for the evidence supporting them." Why should we be obliged to conduct such antiquated verification exercises when the technology exists (and has for some time) to present the "underlying" text with a simple mouse-over. [cf AccessIPCC and even some journals!]
Perhaps if the IPCC were to spend less time, energy and money on tweeting and movie-making "outreach" efforts, and more on adopting that which would add clarity and instant verification (or not!) to their claims and pronouncements, their credibility on the transparency and objectivity fronts would be greatly enhanced.
In conclusion, the view from here, so to speak, is that both you and the powers that be at the IPCC seem to want to have your bread buttered on both sides, while jumping at any opportunity to point the finger of blame in the direction of the skeptics. Thereby avoiding the more obvious conclusion that - notwithstanding all the hand-wringing, moaning and groaning claims to the contrary - the greater the hype, the greater the number of people are choosing to investigate the claims and come to their own conclusions regarding these constant efforts to ... uh ... sustain the need to put more billions in the UN's billion dollar bin.
Or, as I had observed some years ago, even the UNEP's [IPCC alumnus] Joe Alcamo had noted as early as the BC [Before Climategate] IPCC Bali meeting in October 2009:
Harold W
Did Cull leave out a date? If Walpert's statement said "10Gt/year commits us to an additional 0.4C by 2050" it would make a lot more sense.
Chinese whispers? It would be helpful to read Walpert's original statement.
Entropic man -
[Sorry for the delay. I only noticed the responses just now.]
a) Krasting et al. The authors provide some helpful discussion (and graphs) here. I disagree with how you're mapping their charts into real-world predictions: "From an 1880 start, at 10gtC/year from now on, they are predicting +1.3C and 600ppm for 2050." The Krasting et al. scenarios are based on constant emission rates. As the cumulative emissions to date are somewhere on the order of 0.6 TtC, at 10 GtC/yr, one should back up about 60 years, putting the origin of their graphs at around 1950 (rather than 1880). For the 10 GtC/yr scenario, pCO2 doubling occurs around 160 years into the simulation, which would place that slightly past 2100 (not 2050). Temperature rise at doubling is around 1.3 K, as you write. [Which agrees with the Otto et al. best estimate for TCR, by the way.] I would say that it's better than mildly good news if Krasting et al. are right.
b) Walport's statement. I agree that a date might make his statement understandable and possibly defensible. I rather suspect, though, that he was speaking off-the-cuff and merely mixed up the figure. Alex Cull wrote that Walport said this on BBC News 24 the morning of 31 March. However, those aren't available on the BBC site (or at least not from my location), and Alex does not have a transcript of the session. A quick Google doesn't locate any other mention of such a statement. So it seems this is at a dead end.