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The IPCC Special Report – mountain or molehill?

By in Environment on .

According to a number of media sources the just-released IPCC Special Report confirms that climate change is about to fry us (We need massive changes to avoid climate hell says Wired Magazine). In fact it adds nothing of significance to what the IPCC concluded in its 2014 Assessment Report (AR5) and provides no new evidence to support the claim that climate change will fry us when warming reaches 1.5 – 2°C above pre-industrial levels. Effectively all it says is that the impacts of 2°C of warming will be greater than the impacts of 1.5°C of warming. In short, it’s a molehill. Or maybe just a medium-sized cow pat.

The IPCC Special Report:

…. responds to the invitation for IPCC ‘… to provide a Special Report in 2018 on the impacts of global warming of 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels and related global greenhouse gas emission pathways’ contained in the Decision of the 21st Conference of Parties of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change to adopt the Paris Agreement. It will be a key scientific input into the Katowice Climate Change Conference in Poland in December, when governments review the Paris Agreement to tackle climate change.

The results of the report are presented in:

  • A four-page press release
  • A three-page summary of “headline statements”
  • A 33-page Summary for Policymakers, and
  • Complete texts of Chapters 1 through 5, amounting to some hundreds of pages.

Here I address only the first three documents. The Chapters are a little too long for a brief review.

What the press release says

We begin with the more important statements made in the press release, which is what the media will read first and quite possibly all the media will read:

1. Limiting global warming to 1.5ºC would require rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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