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Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Editor: Deirdre S. Blanchfield Date: June 14, 2017 From: Environmental Encyclopedia Publisher: Gale Document Type: Topic overview; International organization overview Length: 2,220 words Content Level: (Level 5) Lexile Measure: 1480L

Full Text: The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was established in 1988 as a joint project of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). The primary mission of the IPCC is to bring together the world's leading experts on the Earth's climate to gather, assess, and disseminate scientific information about climate change, with a view to informing international and national policy makers. The IPCC has become the highest-profile and best- regarded international agency concerned with the climatic consequences of greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide (CO2) and methane (CH4), byproducts of fossil fuel combustion.

The IPCC was established partly in response to Mexican chemist and Nobel Laureate Mario Molina's (1943-) 1985 documentation of chemical processes which occur when human-made chemicals deplete the Earth's atmospheric ozone shield. Ozone (O3) layer depletion results in increased levels of ultraviolet radiation reaching the Earth's surface, producing a host of health, agricultural, and environmental problems. Molina's work helped to persuade most of the industrialized nations to ban chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) and several other ozone-depleting chemicals. It also established a context in which national and international authorities began to pay serious attention to the global environmental consequences of atmospheric changes resulting from industrialization and reliance on fossil fuels.

Continuing to operate under the auspices of the United Nations and headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland, the IPCC is organized into three working groups and a task force, and meets about once a year. The first group gathers scientific data and analyzes the functioning of the climate system with special attention to the detection of potential changes resulting from human activity. The second group's duty is to assess the potential socioeconomic impacts and vulnerabilities associated with climate change. It is also charged with exploring options for humans to adapt to potential climate change. The third group focuses on ways to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and to stop or reduce climate change. The task force is charged with maintaining inventories of greenhouse emissions for all countries.

The IPCC has published its major findings in Full Assessment Reports, first issued in 1990.

The IPCC has drawn a great deal of criticism virtually from its inception. Massive amounts of money are at stake in policy decisions, which might seek to limit greenhouse gas emissions, and much of the criticism directed at the IPCC tends to come from lobbying and research groups mostly funded by industries that either produce or use large quantities of fossil fuels. Thus, a lobbying group sponsored by energy, transportation, and manufacturing interests termed the Global Climate Coalition attacked parts of the 1995 report as unscientific. At the core of the controversy was Chapter Eight of the report, termed Detection of Climate Change and Attribution of Causes. Although the IPCC was careful to hedge its conclusions in various ways, acknowledging difficulties in measurement, disagreements over methodologies for interpreting data, and general uncertainty about the conclusions of its findings, it nevertheless suggested a connection between greenhouse gas emissions and global warming. Not satisfied with such caveats, the Global Climate Coalition charged that the IPCC's conclusions had been presented as far less debatable than they actually were. This cast a cloud of uncertainty over the report, at least for some United States policymakers. However, other leaders took the report more seriously. The Second Assessment Report provided important input to the negotiations that led to the development of the Kyoto Protocol in 1997, a treaty aimed at reducing the global output of greenhouse gases.

In the summer of 1996, results of new studies of the upper atmosphere were published which provided a great deal of indirect support for the IPCC's conclusions. Investigators found significant evidence of cooling in the upper atmosphere and warming in the lower atmosphere, with this effect being especially pronounced in the southern hemisphere. These findings confirmed the predictions of global warming models such as those employed by the IPCC.

Perhaps emboldened by this confirmation, but still facing a great deal of political opposition, the IPCC released an unequivocal statement about climate change and its causes in November 1996. The IPCC declared that "the balance of evidence suggests that there is a discernible human influence on global climate." The statement made clear that a preponderance of evidence and a majority of scientific experts indicated that observable climate change was a result of human activity. The IPCC urged that all nations limit their use of fossil fuels and develop more energy-efficient technologies.

These conclusions and recommendations provoked considerable criticism from less-developed countries. Leaders of the less- industrialized areas of the world tend to view potential restrictions on the use of fossil fuels as unfair hindrance of their efforts to catch up with the United States and Western Europe in industry, transportation, economic infrastructure, and standards of living. The industrialized nations, they point out, were allowed to develop without any such restrictions and now account for the vast majority of the world's energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions. These industrialized nations therefore should bear the brunt of any efforts to protect the global climate, substantially exempting the developing world from restrictions on the use of fossil fuels.

The IPCC's conclusions and recommendations have also drawn strong opposition from industry groups in the United States, such as the American Petroleum Institute, and conservative Republican politicians. These critics charge that the IPCC's new evidence is only fashionable but warmed-over theory, and that no one has yet proven conclusively that climate change is indeed related to human influence. In view of the likely massive economic impact of any aggressive program aimed at the reduction of emissions, there is no warrant for following the IPCC's dangerous and ill-considered advice. Under Republican leadership, Congress slashed funds for the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Department of Energy (DOE) programs concerned with climate change and its causes, as well as funds for researching alternative and cleaner sources of energy.

These funding cuts and the signals they sent created foreign relations problems for the Clinton Administration. The United States was unable to honor former President Bush's (1924-) 1992 pledge (at the Rio de Janeiro Earth Summit) to reduce the country's emission of carbon dioxide and methane to 1990 levels by the year 2000.

In the summer of 2001, the IPCC released its strongest statement to date on the problem of climate change, in its Third Assessment Report. The report, entitled Climate Change 2001, provided further evidence for global warming and its cause--the wide scale burning of fossil fuels by humans. The report projected that global mean surface temperatures on Earth would increase by 2.5-10.4°F (1.5-5.9°C) by the year 2100, unless greenhouse gas emissions were reduced well below current levels. The report also noted that this warming trend would represent the fasting warming of the Earth in ten thousand years, with possible dire consequences to human society and the environment.

The IPCC Fourth Assessment Report, entitled Climate Change 2007, was released in 2007. The Synthesis Report included the findings of the three working groups with reports entitled Physical Science Basis; Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability; and Mitigation of Climate Change. The Fourth Assessment Report was much clearer that climate change is certainly occurring, and that the observed increases in temperatures since the mid-twentieth century are very likely due to a parallel increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations. Global greenhouse gas emissions from human activities increased by 70 percent from 1970 to 2004. Global increases in average air and ocean temperatures, melting of snow and ice, and a rising average sea level were reported. Of the years on record at the time, the average global surface temperature for eleven of the twelve years from 1995 to 2006 were the warmest years since 1850. Recently the years 2014, 2015, and 2016 all set record highs for global average temperature. Warm spells, heat waves, and heavy rainfall are very likely to increase, while there will also likely be an increase in droughts and tropical cyclones. Sea level was predicted to rise by approximately 7 to 23 inches (18-59 centimeters) in the twenty-first century and continue for centuries onwards. According to NASA, global average sea levels are rising at a rate of 0.134 inches (3.4 mm) per year.

In 2007, the IPCC shared the Nobel Peace Prize with former Vice President of the United States Al Gore (1948-). Although it is not uncommon for the Nobel Peace Prize to be awarded to organizations, it was significant that climate change was recognized as relevant to peace. Such an award also served to focus world attention on the problem of climate change.

An increasing number of climate scientists are also critical of the delays between major IPCC assessments, contending that more frequent updates would offer the IPCC timely opportunities to correct for errors or omissions in data and reports. In 2009 and 2010, research polls in both Europe and in the United States showed a decline in public confidence in climate research after exposure of a series of errors in the 2007 IPCC report. In addition to a publication error regarding the rate of glacial melting in the Himalayas, other failures in the IPCC's internal review process resulted in the publication of errant data. Although not directly related to the IPCC, further damage to public confidence resulted from what was dubbed the "Climategate" scandal, which involved the public release of private emails of climate researchers that critics contended reflected unprofessional scientific practices. The vast majority of climate scientists and independent review boards ultimately characterized the mistakes as embarrassing, but minor and with no scientific impact on the main 2007 IPCC conclusions regarding global warming and climate change trends.

In 2017, a Reuters poll conducted shortly after the U.S. announced withdrawal from the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement showed that 68 percent of Americans wanted the United States to lead the world in fighting climate change, half of participants thought participation in the Paris Agreement was necessary to achieve this, but only four percent identified the issue as more important than the U.S. economy or security.

According to the Working Group I contribution to the Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) of the IPCC, a report called Climate Change 2013: The Physical Science Basis, compiled by 259 leading scientists, and released in September 2013, "atmospheric concentrations of the greenhouse gases carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide have all increased since 1750 due to human activity." In 2011 the concentrations of these greenhouse gases exceeded pre-industrial levels by about 40 percent, 150 percent, and 20 percent, respectively. As a result of these factors, IPCC experts predicted that heat waves around the globe would occur more frequently, they would be more intense, and they would last for longer periods of time. They also suggested that wet regions would receive even more precipitation and dry regions would become drier than they currently are.

Ice core data was also used to assess whether current greenhouse gas levels are truly exceptional or if they are simply at a high part of a natural cycle. According to the 2013 IPCC report, "Concentrations of carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide now substantially exceed the highest concentrations recorded in ice cores during the past 800,000 years. The mean rates of increase in atmospheric concentrations over the past century are, with very high confidence, unprecedented in the last 22,000 years."

The 2013 IPCC report also said, "Each of the last three decades has been successively warmer at the Earth's surface than any preceding decade since 1850" and that "global surface temperatures are more likely than not to exceed 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit (2 degrees Celsius) compared to pre-industrial levels by 2100." Leading meteorological associations stated that 2016 was the warmest year on record. All fifteen of the warmest years on record have occurred since 1997.

Even if all emissions of carbon dioxide CO2 were stopped immediately, the IPCC concludes that "most aspects of climate change will persist for many centuries."

With regard to sea level rise, the 2013 IPCC report showed that between 1901 and 2010 (the last year for which there is coordinated global data), global mean sea level rose by between 6.7 and 8.3 inches (0.17 and 0.21 meters). Based on current prediction models, the IPCC predicts that "for the rest of the century, sea level rise is very likely to exceed that observed between 1971 and 2010."

The 2013 IPCC report concludes that "human activities have been shown to have contributed to increased atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations, rising sea level, higher ocean and atmospheric temperatures and reductions in ice and snow." Accordingly, "it is extremely likely that human influence has been the dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid-20th century."

In IPCC assessments and reports: virtually certain means a 99 to 100 percent probability; extremely likely means a 95 to 100 percent probability; very likely means a 90 to 100 percent probability; and more likely than not means a 50 to 100 percent probability.

According to two independent analyses completed by scientists from National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), 2014 ranked as Earth's warmest on record since 1880. The record continued a trend of observations of a warming climate, with nine of the ten warmest years in the instrumental record occurring since the year 2000.

As of June 2017, NASA observations placed global carbon dioxide levels at 406.17 ppm.

Resources

Books

Aldy, Joseph E., R. N. Stavins, and Timothy E. Wirth. Post-Kyoto International Climate Policy: Implementing Architectures for Agreement: Research from the Harvard Project on International Climate Agreements. Cambridge [U.K.]: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Bloom, Arnold J. Global Climate Change: Convergence of Disciplines. Sunderland, Mass: Sinauer Associates, 2010. Bulkeley, Harriet, and Peter Newell. Governing Climate Change. London and New York: Routledge, 2010. Dessler, Andrew Emory, and Edward Parson. The Science and Politics of Global Climate Change: A Guide to the Debate. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Guzman, Andrew T. Overheated: The Human Cost of Climate Change. 2013. World Health Organization, and World Meteorological Organization. Atlas of Health and Climate. Geneva, Switzerland: World Health Organization, 2012.

Web Sites

Climate Action Network. "Climate Action Network International." http://www.climatenetwork.org/ (accessed June 3, 2017). Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Fifth Assessment Report (AR5). http://www.ipcc.ch (accessed June 2, 2017). National Aeronautics and Space Administrations (NASA). "Global Climate Change." https://climate.nasa.gov (accessed June 3, 2017). National Geographic Society. "Map: Global Warming Effects." http://environment.nationalgeographic.com/environment/global- warming/gw-impacts-interactive.html (accessed June 3, 2017). National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). "NOAA: Climate Education Resources." http://www.noaa.gov.ezproxy.uwa.edu/resource-collections/climate-education-resources (accessed June 3, 2017). United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). "Newsroom." http://newsroom.unfccc.int (accessed June 3, 2017). World Bank. "World Bank's Global Climate Investment Funds." http://web.worldbank.org.ezproxy.uwa.edu/WBSITE/EXTERN AL/TOPICS/ENVIRONMENT/EXTCC/0,,menuPK:407870~pagePK:149018~piPK:149093~theSitePK:407864,00.html (accessed June 3, 2017). World Health Organization (WHO). "Climate and health." http://www.who.int.ezproxy.uwa.edu/entity/mediacentre/factsheets/fs266/en/index.html (accessed June 3, 2017).

Full Text: COPYRIGHT Gale, Cengage Learning Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition) "Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)." Environmental Encyclopedia, edited by Deirdre S. Blanchfield, Gale, 2011.

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GRNR&xid=99cec345. Accessed 24 Aug. 2021. Gale Document Number: GALE|CV2644150731