Dear Friends and Family, Segment 1 focuses on “Staging the Debate”- a debate that will consume most of the series. To “Stage the Debate” I have done two things with the follow-on excerpts. First, to provide a perspective of the essence of the debate via four sets of excerpts from Climate Change advocate authors and three sets of excerpts from Climate Change Skeptics. Second, since the International [Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)] has played such a critical role the Climate Change debate, I have included information on who they are, how they work, and who is involved. This is done via excerpts from their website.
Next: Segment 2 will focus on the advocacy position of former Vice-President Gore with excerpts from his 2006 book An Inconvenient Truth.
Happy Learning, Harley
CLIMATE CHANGE - SEGMENT 1 STAGING THE DEBATE - EXCERPTS
THE CASE BY THE CLIMATE CHANGES ADVOCATES: From: An Inconvenient Truth by Al Gore (2006) In every corner of the globe – on land and in water, the melting ice and disappearing snow, during the heat waves and droughts, in the eyes of hurricanes and in the tears of refugees – the world is witnessing mounting and undeniable evidence that nature's cycles are profoundly changing.
The climate crisis is, indeed, extremely dangerous. In fact, it is a true planetary emergency. Two thousand scientists, in a hundred countries, working for more than 20 years in the most elaborate and well-organized scientific collaboration in the history of human kind, have forged an exceptionally strong consensus that all the nations on Earth must work together to solve the crisis of global warming.
The voluminous evidence now strongly suggests that unless we act boldly and quickly to deal with the underlying causes of global warming our world will undergo a string of terrible catastrophes including more and stronger storms like Hurricane Katrina, in both the Atlantic and the Pacific.
We are melting the North Polar ice cap and virtually all of the mountain glaciers in the world. We are destabilizing the massive mound of ice on Greenland and the equally enormous mass of ice propped up on top of the islands in West Antarctica, threatening a worldwide increase in sea levels of as much as 20 feet.
We are dumping so much carbon dioxide into the Earth's environment that we have literally changed the relationship between the Earth and the Sun. So much of that CO2 is being absorbed into the oceans that if we continue at the current rate we will increase the saturation of calcium carbonate to levels that will prevent formation of coral and interfere with the making of shells by any sea creature. Source: An Inconvenient Truth by Al Gore
From A Global Warming Primer by Jeffrey Bennett (2016) The basic science of global warming can be summarized in three simple statements:
Fact: Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, by which we mean a gas that traps heat and makes a plant (like Earth of Venus) warmer than it would be otherwise.
Fact: Human activity, especially the use of fossil fuels – by which we mean coal, oil, and gas, all of which release carbon dioxide when burned – is adding significantly more of this heat trapping gas to Earth's atmosphere.
Inevitable Conclusion: We should expect the rising carbon dioxide concentration to warm our planet, with the warming becoming more severe as we add more carbon dioxide.
Source: A Global Warming Primer by Jeffrey Bennett
From: The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars by Michael E. Mann (2012) For more than two decades, in their efforts to inform the public about climate change and its potentially disastrous consequences, scientists have run up against powerful vested interests who either deny that such change is occurring or, if it is, that human activity plays much if any role in it. I have been privileged to be part of this scientific effort and, indeed, at times singled out in the ensuing conflict. My story is that of a once-aspiring theoretical physicist, driven by a curiosity about the natural world, who would up as a central object of attack in what some have characterized as the best funded, most carefully orchestrated assault on science the world has known.
Despite the uncertainties, my coauthors and I were able to draw important conclusions. We deduced that there had been a decline in temperature from the period running from the eleventh century through the fourteenth – a period sometimes referred to as the medieval warm period – into the colder Little Ice Age of the fifteenth to nineteenth centuries. Think of this as the shaft of a hockey stick laid on its back. This long-term gradual decline was followed by an abrupt upturn in temperatures over the past century. Thus, was born the hockey stick. It didn't take long for the hockey stick to become a central icon in the climate change debate. It told an easily understood story with a simple picture: that a sharp and highly unusual rise in atmospheric warming was occurring on Earth. Furthermore, that rise seemed to coincide with dramatic changes in human activity heralded by industrialization and increased use of fossil fuels. The controversy that the hockey stick would ultimately generate, however, had little to do with the depicted temperature rise in and of itself. Rather, it was a result of the perceived threat this simple graph represented to those who are opposed to governmental regulations or other social restraints aimed at protecting our environment and the long-term prospect for the health of our planet. In this book, I attempt to tell the real story behind the hockey stick. Source: The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars by Michael E. Mann
From: Climate Change – What Everyone Needs to Know by Joseph Romm (2016) Climate change is now an existential issue for humanity. Serious climate impacts have already been observed on every continent. Far more dangerous climate impacts are inevitable without much stronger actions than the world is currently pursuing, as several major 2014 scientific reports concluded.
Since everyone's family will be affected by climate change – indeed, they already are – everyone needs to know the basics about it, regardless of their politics. Many of the major decisions that you, your family, and friends will have to make in the coming years and decades will be affected by human-caused climate change.
In 1988, the nations of the world came together to task the top scientists of the world with regularly summarizing and reporting on the latest research and observations. The central purpose of the resulting United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was to provide the best science to policymakers. In the ensuing years, the science has gotten stronger, in large part because observations around the world confirmed the vast majority of the early predictions made by climate scientists. Because global temperature rise and other impacts are driven by cumulative emissions of greenhouse gases, those soaring emissions have kept the world on track for the worst-case scenarios of climate change.
This book will not enter into the unproductive political debate over the science. Rather, it takes as a starting point the overwhelming consensus of our top global experts and governments, as laid out in the recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change summary reviews of the literature, culminating with the November 2014 "Synthesis Report." The 2014 Report issued their bluntest statement yet to the world: Cut carbon pollutions sharply starting now or risk "severe, pervasive and irreversible impacts for people and ecosystems." Source: Climate Change – What Everyone Needs to Know by Joseph Romm
THE CASE BY THE CLIMATE CHANGE SKEPTICS: From: Climate Change the Facts edited by Alan Moran (2015) Science is underpinned by practitioners who must be skeptical of the methodology used to collect evidence, the analysis of evidence, and the conclusions based on the evidence. On the basis of new evidence, scientists must always be prepared to change their opinions.
Science bows to no authority, is not based on consensus, and is in a constant state of flux. No great advance in science has been made by consensus: advances have been made by individuals paddling upstream. If a scientific theory is not in accord with validated evidence, then the theory must be abandoned and reconstructed. It is skepticism that underpins science, not the comfort of consensus.
The theory of human-induced global warming is not science because research is based on a pre-ordained conclusion, huge bodies of evidence are ignored, and the analytical procedures are treated as evidence. Source: Climate Change the Facts edited by Alan Moran
From: Climate Change the Facts 2017 edited by Jennifer Marohasy (2017) Climate change has taken place for thousands of millions of years. Climate change occurred before humans evolved on earth. Any extraordinary claim, such as that humans cause climate change, must be supported by similarly extraordinary evidence, but this has not been done. It has not been shown that any measured modern climate change is any different from past climate changes. The rate of temperature change, sea-level rise, and biota turnover is no different from the past.
In the past, climate has changed due to numerous processes, and these processes are still driving it. During the time that humans have been on Earth there has been no correlation between temperature change and human emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2). Past global warmings have not been driven by an increase in atmospheric CO2. Without correlations, there can be no causation. Source: Climate Change the Facts 2017 edited by Jennifer Marohasy.
From: Global Warming Alarmists, Skeptics, & Deniers The idea that carbon dioxide d rives the earth’s climate is firmly embedded in the public’s collective mind. In support, reference is made to Antarctic ice core records, and popular books that say when there’s more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, temperature increases. The reality is the opposite. Temperature generally changes in detailed ice core records hundred of years, or even thousands of years, before carbon dioxide. If there is a cause and effect relationship involved between carbon dioxide and temperature, temperature drives carbon dioxide, not the reverse.
This was well known when Al Gore’s book was published in 2006, but it somehow escaped his attention. The fact that temperature changes before carbon dioxide should have been sufficient to falsify the theory of global warming, but global warming is no ordinary scientific theory. Its many ardent supporters were not about to let it be vanquished so easily. Attempting to patch up the theory, they proposed that a positive feedback exists with water vapor. That’s ironic since global warming skeptics had always tried to draw attention to water vapor as the most important greenhouse gas. The proposed mechanism is that in the ice core records, orbital changes nudge temperature in a certain direction, say warming. This causes more evaporation, releasing more water vapor and carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, which causes still more warming, and so on, a classic positive feedback process. The central question is whether such a positive feedback process actually occurs. It has yet to be demonstrated for the earth’s climate system, and it is possible that more water vapor in the atmosphere actually produces a negative feedback by increasing the number of clouds, which both reflect and absorb solar energy, causing cooling.
A central fact of physics is that greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide only absorb infrared energy at certain wavelengths or bands. The effect is logarithmic. At first, adding a little carbon dioxide, greatly increases absorption, but as concentration of the gas increases, much greater amounts of carbon dioxide are required to produce the same amount of absorption, until the maximum absorption potential is reached. After that, adding more carbon dioxide has no effect.
Three of carbon dioxide’s absorption bands are already at maximum absorption and the fourth competes with water vapor. Taking this fact into account, simple arithmetic shows that doubling the current amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere should produce less than 0.6 degrees C of warming. Doubling it again would result in a far smaller increase of temperature. The IPCC, however, estimates much more warming that this from Global Computer Models (GCMs) which are programmed using positive water vapor feedback to greatly amplify the warming from carbon dioxide. Source: Global Warming by C. Dedrick Robinson THE INTERGOVERNMENTAL PANEL ON CLIMATE CHANGE (IPCC) From: The IPCC Website Organization: The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is the leading international body for the assessment of climate change. It was established by the United Nations in 1988 for provide the world with a clear scientific view on the current state of knowledge in climate change and its potential environmental and socio-economic impacts.
The IPCC reviews and assesses the most recent scientific, technical and socio-economic information produced worldwide relevant to the understanding of climate change. It does not conduct any research, nor does it monitor climate related data or parameters.
As an intergovernmental body, membership of the IPCC is open to all member countries of the United Nations. Currently 195 countries are member countries of the IPCC. Governments participate in the review process and the plenary Sessions, where main decisions about the IPCC work program are taken and reports are accepted, adopted and approved. The IPCC Bureau Members, incurring the Chair, are also elected during the plenary Sessions.
Thousands of scientists from all over the world contribute to the work of the IPCC. Review is an essential part of the IPCC process, to ensure an objective and complete assessment of current information. IPCC aims to reflect a range of views and expertise. The Secretariat coordinates all the IPCC work and liaises with Governments.
Because of its scientific and intergovernmental nature, the IPCC embodies a unique opportunity to provide rigorous and balanced scientific information to decision makers. By endorsing the IPCC reports, governments acknowledge the authority of their scientific content.
How does the IPCC work?: The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is a huge and yet very small organization. Thousands of scientists from all over the world contribute to the work of the IPCC on a voluntary basis as authors, contributors and reviewers. None of them is paid by the IPCC. The work of the IPCC is guided by a set of principles and procedures.
The Panel takes major decisions at Plenary Sessions of government representatives.
The IPCC is currently organized in 3 Working Groups and a Task Force. Working Group I deals with “The Physical Science Basis of Climate Change”. Working Group II with “Climate Change Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability” and Working Group III with “Mitigation of Climate Change”. Working Groups meet in Plenary session at the level of government representatives. The main objective of the Task Force on National Greenhouse Gas Inventories is to develop and refine a methodology for the calculation and reporting of national greenhouse gas emissions and removals.
The Panel and the Plenary Sessions: The Panel meets in Plenary Sessions at the level of government representatives for all member countries. Currently the IPCC has 195 members. The Panel meets approximately once a year at the plenary level. These Sessions are attended by hundreds of officials and experts from relevant ministries, agencies and research institutions from member countries and from observer organizations. Major decisions are taken by the Panel during the Plenary Session. For example:
The election of the IPCC Chair, IPCC Bureau, and Task Force Bureau
The structure and mandate of IPCC Working Groups and Task Forces
IPCC Principles and Procedures
The work plan of the IPCC
The budget
The scope and outline of IPCC reports, and
The approval, adoption and acceptance of reports
Role of IPCC Focal Points: Each IPCC Member country has a Focal Point which has been identified by the relevant authorities in the country. IPCC Focal Points prepare and update the list of national experts to help implement the IPCC work program. The Focal Points also arrange for the provision of integrated comments on the accuracy and completeness of the scientific and/or technical content and the overall scientific and/or technical balance of drafts of reports.
The IPCC Bureau: There are currently 34 members. During its 41st Session, the Panel decided to increase the size of the Bureau to 34 members through an increase in representation from Africa (2) and Asia (1).
The purpose of the Bureau is to provide guidance to the Panel on scientific and technical aspects of its work, to advise on related management and strategic issues, and to take decisions on specific issues within its mandate, in accordance with the Principles Governing IPCC work.
The Bureau shall reflect a balanced geographic representation with due consideration for scientific and technical requirements. IPCC Bureau members are grouped according to the six regions of the World Meteorological Organization. None of them is paid by the IPCC.
The Panel at is 33rd Session decided to limit the term of office for the IPCC Chair, IPCC Vice-Chairs and the Co-Chairs of the Working Groups and Task Force on National Greenhouse Gas Inventories to one term in a particular office with the possibility of nomination for election for a further term in the same office for individual cases as decided by the Panel.
IPCC Authors and Experts: Hundreds of experts are involved on a voluntary basis in the preparation of IPCC reports. Coordinating Lead Authors and Lead Authors for IPCC reports are selected by the relevant Working Group/Task Force Bureau, under general guidance provided by the Session of the Working Group from among experts listed by governments and participating organizations and other experts known through their publications and works. None of them is paid by the IPCC.
The composition of the group Coordinating Lead Authors (CLAs) and Lead Authors (LAs) for a chapter, a report of its summary aims to reflect a range of scientific, technical, and socio-economic views and expertise; geographical representation; a mixture of experts with and without previous experience in IPCC; and gender balance.
The CLAs coordinate the content of the chapter they are responsible for. There are usually two CLAs per chapter, one from a developing country and one for a developed one. The LAs work in teams to produce the content of the chapter on the basis of the best scientific, technical and social-economic information available.
Expert Reviews: Expert reviewers review an IPCC draft report either by invitation or at their own request. Their role is to comment on the accuracy and completeness of the scientific, technical or socio-economic balance of draft reports.
IPCC reports undergo a multi-stage review process. During the first review, First Order Drafts are widely circulated to independent experts all over the world that have significant expertise and/or publications in particular areas of the report, and to experts nominated earlier by governments and participating organizations. Those not selected to serve as a Lead Author or Review Editor for a given report traditionally serve as an expert reviewer for the particular report. During the second review by government and experts, Second Order Drafts and a first draft of the Summary for Policymakers will be distributed through the government focal points to all government, all authors, reviewers involved in the previous expert review and further experts registering for the review.
More than 830 Authors and Review Editors from over 80 countries were selected to form the Author teams that produced the Fifth Assessment Report (AR5). They in turn drew on the work of over 1,000 Contributing Authors and about 2,000 expert reviewers who provided over 140,000 review comments.
For the Fourth Assessment Report (AR$) released in 2007, over 3,500 experts coming from more than 130 countries contributed to the report (+450 Lead Authors, +800 Contributing Authors, and +2,500 expert reviewers providing over 90,000 review comments).
History: The scientific evidence brought up by the first IPCC Assessment Report of 1990 underlined the importance of climate change as a challenge requiring international cooperation to tackle its consequences. It therefore played a decisive role in leading to the creation of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the key international treaty to reduce global warming and cope with the consequences of climate change.
The IPCC Second Assessment Report of 1995 provided important material drawn on by negotiators in the run-up to adoption of the Kyoto Protocol in 1997. The Third Assessment Report came out in 2001 and the Fourth in 2007.
The Fourth Assessment Report paid greater attention to the integration of climate change with sustainable development policies and relationships between mitigations and adaptation. At the end of 2007 the IPCC was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
The Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) was released in four parts between September 2013 and November 2014. AR5 provides a clear and up to date view of the current state of scientific knowledge relevant to climate change. It consists of three Working Group reports and a Synthesis Report which integrates and synthesizes material in the Working Group reports for policymakers. The Sixth Assessment Report is expected to be finalized in 2020 in time for the global stock take forseen under the UNFCCC Paris Agreement. Source: IPCC Website