Climate 411

This post is by Lisa Moore, Ph.D., a scientist in the Climate and Air program at Environmental Defense.

This past week, IPCC’s Nobel Prize-winning scientists met in Valencia, Spain to write a synthesis of their three-volume report. The Summary for Policymakers of the Synthesis Report [PDF] makes it very clear that we need to act immediately to avoid the worst effects of global warming.

IPCC Chairman Dr. Rajendra Pachauri summarized the main message as follows: “Climate change is a serious threat to development everywhere. Today, the time for doubt has passed. The IPCC has unequivocally affirmed the warming of our climate system, and linked it directly to human activity. Slowing or even reversing the existing trends of global warming is the defining challenge of our age.”

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This post is by Michael Oppenheimer, Ph.D., the Albert G. Milbank Professor of Geosciences and International Affairs in the Woodrow Wilson School and the Department of Geosciences at Princeton University. He also serves as science advisor to Environmental Defense.

The award of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize to Al Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is an important milestone in the journey toward a global warming solution, and it got me thinking about how the IPCC came to be. To some extent, it was thanks to a miscalculation by the Reagan Administration!

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This post is by Michael Oppenheimer, Ph.D., the Albert G. Milbank Professor of Geosciences and International Affairs in the Woodrow Wilson School and the Department of Geosciences at Princeton University. He also serves as science advisor to Environmental Defense.

We’re already seeing environmental changes from global warming, and some key ones are occurring more quickly than scientists expected. Consequently, many experts from diverse disciplines are uncomfortable with the slow pace of governments in addressing this issue. The growing sense of urgency arises from two concerns:

• Earth’s climate system may be rapidly approaching a point of no return where large, irreversible and destructive changes, like the gradual disintegration of an ice sheet, become inevitable.
• To achieve any given temperature goal, the longer we delay action, the steeper emissions reductions will need to be. It’s easier to cut emissions gradually than it is to slash them drastically.

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