"It Is Not Hopeless," says World's Chief Climate Scientist

Published on Tuesday, October 28, 2014 by Common Dreams

"It Is Not Hopeless," says World's Chief Climate Scientist

 

As Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change opens meeting to finalize latest report to the world, head of agency says meeting challenge of global warming will not be easy, but that it can be done

 

by Jon Queally, staff writer

'May I humbly suggest that policymakers avoid being overcome by the seeming hopelessness of addressing climate change,' said Rajendra Pachauri, chairperson of the IPCC, on Monday. (Photo: NASA)

"It is not hopeless."

That was the key message delivered in Copenhagen on Monday by Rajendra Pachauri, chairperson of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), as the agency met to finalize the findings and language of its pending Synthesis Report, the last installment of its Fifth Assessment Report (AR5), designed to provide the world's policymakers with a comprehensive scientific assessment of the risks of human-caused global warming and climate change.

"We still have time to build a better, more sustainable world. We still have time to avoid the most serious impacts of climate change... But we have precious little of that time." —Rajendra Pachauri, IPCC chair

"The Synthesis Report will provide the roadmap by which policymakers will hopefully find their way to a global agreement to finally reverse course on climate change," said Pachauri. "It gives us the knowledge to make informed choices, the knowledge to build a brighter, more sustainable future. It enhances our vital understanding of the rationale for action—and the serious implications for inaction."


What was critical for world leaders, policymakers and the global public at large to understand, he said, was that though it won't be easy to avert the worse impacts of the world's changing climate, it is possible.

"A great deal of work and tall hurdles lie ahead. But it can be done. We still have time to build a better, more sustainable world. We still have time to avoid the most serious impacts of climate change," he said.  "But we have precious little of that time."

The series of recent IPCC reports that have come out over the last twelve months and make up the AR5 assessment have shared the common theme of urgency and the Synthesis Report, once finalized, will be the official word from the world's top climate scientists as national government's send their delegates to next year's meeting of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC) in Paris. Alongside the most thorough review of the available climate research ever conducted, the report will offer specific guidance on both mitigation and solutions to address the dangerous levels of greenhouse gases that are increasingly warming the planet's atmosphere and oceans.

"Much has been made of the growing peril of delaying the hard choices that need to be made to adapt to and mitigate climate change," said Pauchari. "I do not discount those challenges. But the Synthesis Report shows that solutions are at hand."

At the last high-level UNFCC talks, known as Conferences of Parties meetings or (COP), world leaders agreed to the goal of limiting global temperature increases this century to 2°C, but so far no binding commitments have been made, either at the national or international level, that scientists say would such a target.

Watch the IPCC's opening session:

Climate records are breaking so often now, we’ve stopped paying attention

The Washington Post

Wonkblog

Climate records are breaking so often now, we’ve stopped paying attention

By Chris Mooney 

October 21, 2014

 

Land and ocean temperature departure from average for September 2014. NOAA

 

On Monday, we learned from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration that last September was the hottest of them all, out of 135 Septembers going back to 1880.The same was true for August 2014. And June of 2014. And May of 2014. What that means is that for each of these months, the combined average global land and ocean surface temperature has never been higher, at least since we started recording these temperatures back in the presidency of Rutherford B. Hayes.

These kinds of records are becoming so regular that they're starting to seem a lot less impressive. They're shrug-inducing. But to think of them in that way is a mistake. A little context shows just how dramatic the warming of the globe, on a month-by-month basis, has actually been.

You see, for 355 months now (up through September), "every month on this planet has been warmer than the 20th century average," according to Jessica Blunden, a scientist at NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center. The Post's own Philip Bump, then writing at Grist, pointed out numbers like these back in November 2012, when the streak was only 332 consecutive months--but since then, every month has just added to the total. And now, we're just shy of 30 years of unbroken warmer-than-average months. The last month that actually was not warmer than the 20th century average, according to Blunden, was February of 1985. (It was merely average, she says.)

If you took out a 30-year mortgage that February, and never refinanced or sold--but just kept paying the unchanged payment--you'd have just a few months to go now. And during that entire period of the mortgage, the globe never saw a cooler-than-average month.

Or consider the human lifespan. Right now, in the US, it's 78.7 years. That's just over 944 months. In other words, for more than a third of an average US human lifespan, warmer-than-average months have been the unbroken rule. So will we ever have a colder-than-average month again? Blunden doesn't see it as very likely. "It can happen, but we just haven’t seen it in a long time, and we don’t really expect to see it any time soon," she says. A colder than average year is even less likely.

Granted, it is not as if most Americans actually feel these steady above-average temperatures, certainly not in a constant way. Nobody actually experiences a global average temperature. Less than a year ago, many of us were freezing amid the descent of the “polar vortex” into the continental US. But that’s local weather. There are constant cold and warm fluctuations in individual places. But warmth has predominated overall.

In its analysis of 2014 and its amazingly warm temperatures, NOAA also presents this figure, which takes a bit of interpreting—but once you figure out the punchline, it’s pretty stunning.

Source: NOAA

The gist here is that 2014 appears reasonably likely to wind up the hottest year on record, in NOAA's accounting. In fact, to tie that record, the remainder of the year merely has to be average for the 21^st century.

In climate science circles, there’s already much discussion of the likelihood of 2014 setting a new record. Climate researchers are particularly struck by the fact that prior record years, like 1998 (now the 3^rd warmest overall, according to NOAA)  have often been El Nino years, which are hotter than average. But so far an official El Nino has not yet been proclaimed.

Thus, a new global average temperature record in 2014 would be all the more extraordinary. So will it happen? "As we watch daily temperature results come in, it’s becoming ever more likely," says John Abraham, a climate scientist at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota who studies ocean warming and climate change. Abraham emphasizes, though, that there are several other global agencies besides NOAA (including our own NASA) that also track temperatures and they don't always perfectly agree on the ranking of record years.

"We may break the all-time temperature record without having an El Nino," adds Abraham. "Which means that the Earth shouldn’t be warm this year."

Global warming has often been likened to the situation of a frog in slowly boiling water. We’ve been the frog for almost 30 years.