The IPCC report: the science is there, but are we willing to change?

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has delivered the final blow to climate-change sceptics. The word its report uses is ‘unequivocal’. But is the world prepared to accept the results of this judgement?

Dr Stephan Harding, author of Animate Earth and coordinator of the MSc in Holistic Science at the Schumacher College, dissects the report for the Ecologist Online.

Readers of The Ecologist cannot have failed to notice that the UN’s IPCC recently published its long-awaited Summary Report for Policymakers (the ‘SPM’) on the physical science basis of climate change. The publication of this document (and of the three volumes that are soon to follow) marks a watershed in our understanding of our impacts on the world’s climate and, along with the Stern Review, constitutes the most important alarm-call to date about the dangers of climate change. An important point to bear in mind about any IPCC report (this is the fourth they have produced – the last was in 2001) is that it is the result of a hard-won consensus amongst many hundreds of climate scientists from many countries around the world. Every word has been fought over with careful deliberation, a process that effectively weeds out extreme views at either end of the spectrum. What remains is thus a guardedly conservative assessment about the likely effects of climate change by the end of this century. So what then are the IPCC’s conclusions?

Read the rest of Stephan’s article for The Ecologist – here

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