IPCC report summary censored by governments around the world

The Sydney Morning Herald

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IPCC report summary censored by governments around the world

Date

April 14, 2014

Nick Miller

Europe Correspondent

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Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Working Group III co-chair Ottmar Edenhofer. Photo: Reuters

Berlin: A major climate report presented to the world was censored by the very governments who requested it, frustrating and angering some of its lead authors.

The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change on Sunday released the "summary for policymakers" in Berlin, intended to be a palatable synopsis of the technical conclusions of more than 200 experts on how to stop runaway global warming – and what that would cost.

However entire paragraphs, plus graphs showing where carbon emissions have been increasing the fastest, were deleted from the summary during a week’s debate prior to its release. Other sections had their meaning and purpose significantly diluted. They were victims of a bruising skirmish between governments in the developed and developing world over who should shoulder the blame for, and the responsibility for fixing, climate change.

Members of Greenpeace at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin. Photo: Reuters

One report author joked that he felt like a “pawn” who had been sacrificed in a game. Several others told Fairfax the rancour was much greater than in previous IPCC meetings.

The encounter was a prelude to what promises to be a bitter battle in Paris next year, where countries are intended to sign a new binding treaty on radical action against global warming. Countries including – but not limited to – the United States, Brazil, China and Saudi Arabia fought to ensure the summary could not be used as a weapon against them in pre-Paris negotiations.

The IPCC Working Group III report found that, in order to keep temperature change below two degrees, the world will have to quickly switch over to an energy supply dominated by renewables such as wind and solar power, with carbon-capture technology mopping up the remaining fossil fuel use.

The report's co-chair Dr Rajendra Pachauri. Photo: Reuters

However several authors said that teams of negotiators sent in by governments had refused to accept controversial parts of the report for inclusion in the summary of policymakers. Their work only survives in the full, technical report, which will be read by far fewer people, and was not released to the media on Sunday.

Some of the economists and scientists involved even considered withdrawing their work entirely, so they could speak without having to toe the eventual IPCC line.

Fairfax was told that the co-chair of Working Group III, Professor Ottmar Edenhofer, is one of those aggrieved by changes. It is believed he may use "unadulterated" parts of the report, as well as the amended summary, in a presentation at Technical University in Berlin on Monday.

However he said that getting governments involved created “ownership” of the report’s conclusions, and “there’s nothing wrong with that as long as scientists have control over the full report”.

Economist Reyer Gerlagh, of Tilburg University in the Netherlands, was a co-ordinating lead author on a chapter of the report. He saw a lot of his work – exploring the link between economies and their carbon emissions - deleted from the summary over the last week.

“Some governments [said] we cannot write things that they forsee will immediately have consequences in international negotiations,” Professor Gerlagh said. “They cannot change the scientific findings. But they can say there are things that are not [appropriate] to be told at [the SPM] level.

“It left me depressed personally, initially ... I am not paid for this work. I do most of this work on the weekend, in evenings and on holidays. My payment is not in money or time, my payment is that I believe I can contribute to society’s benefit by providing the information.

Despite this, Professor Gerlagh said he was not angry: “I can understand their point,” he said of the countries who asked for changes or deletions.

In other parts of the summary, objections from rich nations resulted in the removal of a line saying: “In 2010, ten countries accounted for about 70 per cent of CO2 emissions from fossil fuel combustion and industrial processes.”

They also demanded, and won, removal of a line reporting that ethical mitigation of climate change would require the developed world to transfer “hundreds of billions of dollars per year” to non-OECD countries to invest in green technologies.

Objections from "upper middle income" countries resulted in the deletion of a graph that showed the stunning rise in emissions from those countries in the decade to 2010, compared with other parts of the world.

“The atmosphere has of course been contentious on some details,” said Stephan Singer, director of energy policy for the WWF, who was an observer during the week’s debate. “Some of the stuff is much more clearly spelled out in the underlying chapters than it is in the [summary].”

But Dr Singer said the alterations should not be allowed to distract from the central message.

“This document is sufficient enough to tell governments what to do to stay below two degrees [temperature rise], despite some vague and ambiguous language [added by] the governments which was based on consensus and haggling back and forth for very long hours.”

Report co-chair Dr Rajendra Pachauri, asked what had been omitted from the summary, said “the entire IPCC process and the approval of the [summary] is based on debate and discussion and naturally when you have different points of view there will be disagreement. The strength of the process is that we were able to resolve them.”

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/world/ipcc-report-summary-censored-by-governments-around-the-world-20140414-zqugm.html#ixzz2yzu81P9R

grist

15 Apr 2014 11:53 AM

 

U.N. climate report was censored

By John Upton

Shutterstock

Keep walking past the earthly conflagration, folks. There’s nothing to see here.

When the latest installment of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report landed over the weekend, only a 33-page summary was published. The full report, which details the radical steps we need to take to reduce greenhouse gas pollution if we are to succeed in capping warming at 2 degrees Celsius, wasn’t published until this morning. So that summary was the basis for hundreds of media reports beamed and printed all around the world.

And it turns out the summary was watered down — diluted from an acid reflux–inducing stew of unpalatable science into a more appetizing consommé of half-truth. The Sydney Morning Herald has the details:

A major climate report presented to the world was censored by the very governments who requested it, frustrating and angering some of its lead authors. …

[E]ntire paragraphs, plus graphs showing where carbon emissions have been increasing the fastest, were deleted from the summary during a week’s debate prior to its release. Other sections had their meaning and purpose significantly diluted. They were victims of a bruising skirmish between governments in the developed and developing world over who should shoulder the blame for, and the responsibility for fixing, climate change.

One report author joked that he felt like a “pawn” who had been sacrificed in a game. Several others told Fairfax [Media Limited] the rancour was much greater than in previous IPCC meetings.

The encounter was a prelude to what promises to be a bitter battle in Paris next year, where countries are intended to sign a new binding treaty on radical action against global warming. Countries including — but not limited to — the United States, Brazil, China and Saudi Arabia fought to ensure the summary could not be used as a weapon against them in pre-Paris negotiations.

This sad story has precedence. The previous installment of the report, which dealt with climate adaptation, stated that poor countries need $100 billion a year to help them cope with climatic changes – but that dollar figure was yanked from the report’s summary by rich governments at the last moment.

Source

• IPCC report summary censored by governments around the world, The Sydney Morning Herald

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

Dear Humanity, Time Has Run Out

Published on Monday, April 7, 2014 by Common Dreams

Dear Humanity, Time Is Running Out

 

Next and final chapter in IPCC climate change assessment will say window is fast closing for society to respond to worst impacts of fast-warming planet

- Jon Queally, staff writer 

 

 

 


Avoiding dangerous climate change will require not just rapid reductions in fossil fuel use but also a revolution in the structures of our economies and societies, according to a momentous UN scientific report on climate change to be released next week in Berlin. (Photo: Shutterstock)The next chapter of the UN climate panel's scientific report on global warming is due out next week in Berlin, but a draft of the document seen by the Reuters news agency reveals that the main message for humanity and society is simply this: time is running out.
According to Reuters:

Government officials and top climate scientists will meet in Berlin from April 7-12 to review the 29-page draft that also estimates the needed shift to low-carbon energies would cost between two and six per cent of world output by 2050.

It says nations will have to impose drastic curbs on their still rising greenhouse gas emissions to keep a promise made by almost 200 countries in 2010 to limit global warming to less than 2 degrees Celsius over pre-industrial times.

This third chapter of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)’s Fifth Assessment Report will move away from the causes and scientific consensus of climate change (covered in the first chapter) and the impacts of global warming and changing climate patterns (covered in the second), and focus on the possible steps that can be taken to avoid the very worst case scenarios that scientists have set forth.

To avoid these dangers, the report will say, society will not only need to rapidly reduce use of fossil fuels, but also revolutionize the structures of its economies, food systems, and energy grids.

"Climate change is global-scale violence, against places and species as well as against human beings." —Rebecca Solnit 

What this next chapter will highlight is that for all the alarming warnings generated by the scientific community and confirmed by the IPCC's comprehensive analysis of that science, is that world government's and the powerful private sector have done next to nothing to meet the challenge now before humanity.

“So far, world leaders have sorely lacked the political will to make the shift to low-carbon societies," said Dipti Bhatnagar, Friends of the Earth International Climate Justice and Energy coordinator, as she responded to the latest IPCC draft.

According to Agence France-Presse, which also saw a draft of the chapter, the panel suggests there is a 15-year window for affordable action to safely reach the UN's warming limit of two degrees Celsius.

“Scientists confirm that we must take urgent steps to avoid triggering catastrophic climate change and its irreversible impacts on humans and ecosystems. Real solutions to the climate crisis are already available. We need community-based energy solutions, energy efficiency and reduced consumption levels, not dangerous energy sources like fossil fuels or nuclear power,” said Inga Roemer of Friends of the Earth Germany / BUND.

Roemer was responding to potentially controversial aspects of the IPCC recommendations, which may include the use of nuclear energy to offset the imperative of scaling back reliance on fossil fuels. Environmentalists have largely rejected those in the scientific community who have suggested that nuclear power —even if "done right" and safer—is a realistic and responsible solution to the carbon-based energy system.

For all the warnings, however, what environmentalists and climate activists are calling for is the paradigm shift that the science—and the economic implications of the fossil fuel industry—have long been showing is necessary.

As green activist and author Rebecca Solnit writes at the Guardian on Monday, the consistent and current refusal by governments and industry to address the crisis of human-caused climate change should be called what it is: violence against humanity and planet Earth itself.
Solnit writes:

Climate change is anthropogenic – caused by human beings, some much more than others. We know the consequences of that change: the acidification of oceans and decline of many species in them, the slow disappearance of island nations such as the Maldives, increased flooding, drought, crop failure leading to food-price increases and famine, increasingly turbulent weather. (Think Hurricane Sandy and the recent typhoon in the Philippines, and heat waves that kill elderly people by the tens of thousands.)

Climate change is violence.

So if we want to talk about violence and climate change – and we are talking about it, after last week's horrifying report from the world's top climate scientists – then let's talk about climate change as violence. Rather than worrying about whether ordinary human beings will react turbulently to the destruction of the very means of their survival, let's worry about that destruction – and their survival. Of course water failure, crop failure, flooding and more will lead to mass migration and climate refugees – they already have – and this will lead to conflict. Those conflicts are being set in motion now.

What comes next, Solnit says, is entirely up to humanity's capacity to admit the problem, call it by its true name, and then systematically and aggressively address it.

"That's a tired phrase, the destruction of the Earth," admits Solnit. "But translate it into the face of a starving child and a barren field – and then multiply that a few million times."

__________________________________________

 

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The next mass extinction event has already begun.

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Fri Oct 04, 2013 at 05:41 AM PDT

The Oceans are Dying: Oxygen is Depleting, Acidity Rising at Fastest Rate in 300,000,000 Years

by FishOutofWaterFollow for Ocean Advocates

 

Oxygen levels are dropping and ocean waters are acidifying at the fastest rate in at least 300 million years when the greatest marine extinction in earth's history took place according to The State of the Ocean Report 2013 written by an international panel of marine scientists. 

 

Today's explosive increase in human CO2 emissions and warming of the oceans are recreating the conditions of the great Permian extinction 300 million years ago when massive volcanic eruptions in Siberia triggered the release of enormous amounts of stored carbon. A leading theory is that deoxygenation and acidification of the oceans led to the bacterial production of toxic hydrogen sulfide gas which poisoned species dependent on oxygen. By the end of this natural catastrophe 90% to 95% of all marine species were extinct. The biodiversity of the oceans took 30 million years for to recover.

The next mass extinction event may have already begun.

the scale and rate of the present day carbon perturbation, and resulting ocean acidification, is unprecedented in Earth’s known history. Today’s rate of carbon release, at approximately 30Gt of CO2 per year, is at least 10 times faster than that which     preceded the last major species extinction (the Paleocene Eocene Thermal Maximum extinction, or PETM, ca. 55 million years ago), while geological records indicate that the current acidification is unparalleled in at least the last 300 million years. We are entering an unknown territory of marine ecosystem change, and exposing organisms to intolerable evolutionary pressure. The next mass extinction event may have already begun.

A "deadly trio” of acidification, warming and deoxygenation
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Human CO2 emissions directly cause both global warming and ocean acidification. But that's just the beginning. Mixing tends to decline in warming waters because a warm fresh surface layer is substantially lighter than colder middle and deep water. The surface layer tends to float and not mix. Organic carbon is always falling from the surface to deeper waters. Bacteria oxidize the fallen carbon to CO2. This process reduces oxygen levels and increases the acidity of the water. When the rate of mixing declines the residence time of water in a layer increases, so acidity levels tend to rise and oxygen levels drop in layers below the surface as the climate warms. 

Hypoxic - low oxygen - water may be already killing keystone species in the Pacific northwest.

COOS BAY — Something is killing large numbers of a keystone species off the Oregon Coast. Federal researchers say it could spell danger for the region’s other marine life.

Bill Peterson, an oceanographer with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Hatfield Marine Science Center in Newport, said in the past few weeks millions of dead North Pacific krill have washed up on beaches between Newport and Eureka, Calif.
Peterson said it’s the largest die-off he’s aware of in recent history. ...
Joe Tyburczy, a researcher with the California Sea Grant extension office who has been looking into the dead krill with Peterson, said oceanographic cruises along the northern California coast did find lower oxygen levels than usually seen in Pacific Northwest waters.
“If it is hypoxia, there’s a possibility of implications for other species like crab,” he said.

Acidification of sea water in Washington State oyster hatcheries killed the developing oysters. Please watch this outstanding video on ocean acidification.

Oysters started dying by the billions along the Northwest coast in 2005, and have been struggling ever since. When scientists cautiously linked the deaths to plummeting ocean pH in 2008 and 2009, few outside the West Coast’s $110 million industry believed it.

By the time scientists confirmed it early last year, the region’s several hundred oyster growers had become a global harbinger — the first tangible sign anywhere in the world that ocean acidification already was walloping marine life and hurting people.

Richard Feely and a team of scientists from Pacific Marine Environmental Lab were stunned to discover cold, acidic, low-oxygen water welling up to the surface along the northern California coast in 2007. Scientists had not expected acidification to hit the west coast for 50 to 100 years. Dr. Feely published his work and word of it reached oyster farmers who's hatcheries were failing.

The oyster farmers invited Feely to their annual conference. Feely explained that when north winds blew, deep ocean water was drawn right to the beach, which meant this newly corrosive water probably got sucked into the hatchery. That same water also flowed into the Strait of Juan de Fuca and made its way to Hood Canal.
The oyster industry pleaded with Congress, which supplied money for new equipment. Over several years, the hatcheries tested their water using high-tech pH sensors. When the pH was low, it was very low and baby oysters died within two days. By drawing water only when the pH was normal, shellfish production got back on track.

“They told us it was like turning on headlights on a car — it was so clear what was going on,” Feely said.

Moreover, because processes in the ocean are slow to change this deadly water would continue to affect the Pacific northwest for another 50 years if all human CO2 emissions stopped today. It will take 30 to 50 years for the most acidic water already present along the west coast to well up. This is the beginning of a disaster that we cannot stop. The best we can do is to keep it from growing far larger and far more deadly. The changes happening in the waters of the Pacific northwest are the first stages of a global marine catastrophe if CO2 emissions are not rapidly reduced. 

 

Deadly trio will have cascading consequences for marine biology & humans

It is the simultaneous occurrence of the “deadly trio” of acidification, warming and deoxygenation that is seriously effecting how productive and efficient the ocean is, as temperatures, chemistry, surface stratification, nutrient and oxygen supply are all implicated, meaning that many organisms will find themselves in unsuitable environments. These impacts will have cascading consequences for marine biology, including altered food web dynamics and the expansion of pathogens. To make matters even worse, this is all happening to marine ecosystems already undermined by other human pressures such as overfishing, eutrophication and pollution.

The adaption of species to these altered conditions is in some cases possible – as is migration, though as warming demands a poleward migration while acidification encourages the movement to warmer more equatorial waters the “green pastures” will become increasingly scarce and competition for them fierce. Mass extinctions happen in the geological equivalent of overnight; we may already have entered into an extinction period and not yet realized it. What is certain is that current carbon perturbations will have huge implications for humans, and may well be the most important challenge faced since the first hominids evolved.

 

Originally posted to Ocean Advocates on Fri Oct 04, 2013 at 05:41 AM PDT.

Also republished by DK GreenRoots and Climate Change SOS.

The Perfect Storm: Climate Change and Inequality Brewing Global Social Upheaval

Published on Friday, April 4, 2014 by Common Dreams
 

Climate Change and Inequality Brewing Global Social Upheaval

 

World Bank chief admits institution's past mistakes, but has it changed its destructive ways?

- Jon Queally, staff writer 

President of the World Bank, Jim Yong Kim, is warning that the combined crises of planetary climate change and rising global inequality in a highly interconnected world will lead to the rise of widespread upheaval as the world's poor rise up and clashes over access to clean water and affordable food result in increased violence and political conflict.


 

As Jim Yong Kim warned of the risks of climate change, the UN said food prices had risen to their highest in almost a year. (Photograph: Kevin Lamarque/Reuters)



In an interview ahead of a bank summit next week, Kim predicts that battles over food and water will break out in the next five to ten years as a direct result of a warming planet that world leaders have done too little to address, despite warnings from the environmental community and scientists.

"The water issue is critically related to climate change," Kim told the Guardian. "People say that carbon is the currency of climate change. Water is the teeth. Fights over water and food are going to be the most significant direct impacts of climate change in the next five to 10 years. There's just no question about it."
Despite the acknowledgement of the problem, however, and even as he made mea culpa for past errors by the powerful financial institution he now runs (including a global push to privatize drinking water resources and utilities), Kim laid the blame on inaction on the very people who have done the most to alert humanity to the crisis, saying that both climate change activists and informed scientists have not done enough to offer a plan to address global warming in a way he deems "serious."

He said: "They [the climate change community] kept saying, 'What do you mean a plan?' I said a plan that's equal to the challenge. A plan that will convince anyone who asks us that we're really serious about climate change, and that we have a plan that can actually keep us at less than 2C warming. We still don't have one."

Kim also acknowledged the threat of unaddressed inequality, saying that access to the internet (mostly through smartphones) in the developing world has created conditions where everyone on the planet knows how other people live, which means that the "next huge social movement" could erupt anywhere at anytime.

"It's going to erupt to a great extent because of these inequalities," he continued and said heads of state from around the world have called for "a much, much deeper understanding of the political dangers of very high levels of inequality."
The question remains: Do these acknowledgements of the dual crisis of a warming, less equal planet from the leader of the World Bank really translate into a transformation of the institution that is well known as one of the key proponents of the policies and projects that have led us to this point.?

According to a new report the World Resources Institute, the answer remains: No.

The new analysis from WRI says that despite Kim's recent rhetoric and focus on "sustainability" for the bank, the reality "shows that while the World Bank has successfully addressed a number of important economic and social risks in its projects, it is falling short in recognizing climate risks."

Out of 60 recent World Bank projects assessed, according to researchers, "only 25 percent included features that took climate change risks into account. This shortfall could leave communities vulnerable to extreme weather, sea level rise, and other climate impacts—impacts that threaten to undermine the World Bank’s efforts to eliminate poverty."

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Food and Water Shortages May Prove Major Risks of Climate Change

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This article is from the In-Depth Report 400 PPM: What's Next for a Warming Planet

Food and Water Shortages May Prove Major Risks of Climate Change

Poor people will suffer the most, unless the world exploits vanishing opportunities to adapt 

 

Mar 30, 2014 |By David Biello

 

Courtesy of NASA

The rich play with fire and the poor get burned. That sums up a report issued March 31 by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) about the worsening risks of climate change. Yet even rich nations will face serious challenges. "Nobody on this planet is going to be untouched by climate change," said IPCC chair Rajendra Pachauri at a press conference releasing the report in Yokohama, Japan.

According to Pachauri and the hundreds of scientists who prepared the report, climate change is no longer something that will happen in the future. It is already here, and it is already impacting people on all seven continents and seven seas. The world now has a different climate than it had only a few decades ago, thanks to fossil fuel burning, forest clearing and other human activities.

As a result, the need for nations everywhere to adapt is already here, according to the report of the second team of IPCC scientists (known as Working Group II), who assessed more than 12,000 scientific papers to deliver an authoritative consensus on the impacts of climate change, the vulnerabilities of society and the natural world, as well as how we might adapt to a changed climate. "We see impacts from the equators to the poles and the coast to the mountains," noted biologist Christopher Field of Stanford University, co-chair of Working Group II at the press event.

The opportunity to prevent catastrophic global warming has not disappeared, even if the world has burned through half the fossil fuels it can, according to the first team of IPCC scientists who assessed the fundamental physics of climate change and released their report in September. But the world must drop its carbon habit soon. Since 1880, 531 gigatons of carbon have been emitted, and the IPCC scientists estimate that no more than 800 gigatons should be emitted for a better-than-even chance of keeping global warming below 2 degrees Celsius. If warming rises beyond that threshold, the scientists say, serious harm will be done to ecosystems and societies everywhere. The more warming, the greater the risk of "severe, pervasive and irreversible impacts," the new report states.

Unfortunately, in just the time between this report and the last iteration in 2007, climate change has grown 40 percent stronger thanks to ever increasing emissions of greenhouse gases. Already, the world has warmed 0.85 degree C since 1880. Global warming is now "unequivocal" and concentrations of CO2 have reached levels "unprecedented in at least the last 800,000 years." Or as Michel Jarraud, secretary-general of the World Meteorological Organzation put it at the press conference: "Ignorance is no longer an excuse. We know."

In that light, climate change becomes a risk management proposition, particularly given the uncertainty about exactly how bad impacts might become and when. The worst risks include sea level rise for small islands and coasts, flooding, the breakdown of infrastructure in the face of extreme weather, loss of livelihoods for farmers and fishers, food insecurity and heat-wave deaths. Expect a big demand for energy for air conditioning as the 21st century continues.

Some of these impacts are already here, from a meltdown of polar ice and glaciers everywhere to higher rates of sea level rise than the IPCC predicted in the past. Crops, such as wheat and maize (corn), have been hurt more by heat waves and drought than helped by higher levels of CO2, which can sometimes permit more luxuriant plant growth. Some crop yields in places like northern Europe and southeastern South America where drought has not set in have actually improved.

The bad outweighs the good to date. Reductions in yields of wheat and maize have already had an impact on food prices, and some argue on the stability of nations as well. Extreme weather—from floods to wildfires—continues to take an increasing toll, and climate change will likely exacerbate existing health problems such as malaria and heat stroke. The biggest impact may prove to be changes to the availability of fresh water. All of these hazards, laid out in detail in the new report, afflict the poorest the most, particularly subsistence farmers throughout the world who depend on consistent rains for adequate food. "They are threatened in their very existence," Pachauri argued at the press conference.

Climate change will also raise the risk of conflict, whether civil war or fights between nation states over critical resources or boundaries, according to the new report. In short, climate change will make remedying existing poverty that much harder.

Opportunities still exist for adaptation, however. Communities, cities, states and nations have begun to adapt, whether improved water management in San Diego, Calif., or planting mangroves to stabilize seashores in the island nation of Tuvalu. Cimate change can be ameliorated both by cutting back on the pollution that causes it as well as by improving society to decrease vulnerability.

Future adaptation may include, for the poorest people, moving, either voluntarily or when displaced by disaster. And how societies choose to adapt will be vital as certain choices—geoengineering with artificial volcanoes or building sea walls, for example—may prove maladaptive in the long term.

The natural world has had to adapt as well, with animals and even plants moving or shifting seasonal behaviors or migration. Some marine animals have shifted their range by as much as 400 kilometers in pursuit of equally cold climes, and ocean acidification is accelerating. As the climate continues to change, species will face even greater challenges, and many may go extinct as global warming tips them into disaster when paired with other threats such as habitat loss. Entire ecosystems will be transformed, like the march of shrubs into the former tundra of Siberia and North America. "We may already be on the threshold or over the threshold of the sixth mass extinction in earth's history," Field noted.

Undercutting the optimism for ongoing adaptation is the fact that the IPCC has consistently underestimated the speed and scale of climate change. Continuing to improve the data about impacts is an ongoing challenge for the scientific community. And, in the larger view, as co-chair Field put it in his speech to open the session finalizing the new report: "Dealing effectively with climate change is one of the defining challenges of the 21st century."