April 14th, 2008 · No Comments

By Harriet Blake

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which completed a four-day conference in Budapest last week (April 9-11), has come under fire recently. Considered alarmist by some when it first formed in 1988, the panel is now being critiqued on several fronts for not being alarmist enough.

The IPCC, which won the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with former vice president Al Gore, was created by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) to provide political leaders with climate reports in light of global warming. The Geneva-based panel is composed of climate scientists and experts who have issued climate change reports in 1990, 1996, 2001 and 2007. The next one is due in 2014.

Earlier this month, an article in the international weekly nature criticized the IPCC for underestimating the technology needed to reverse global warming during the panel’s 2007 conference.

The scientist authors of the nature piece, Roger Pielke Jr., Tom Wigley and Christopher Green, argue that the IPCC seriously miscalculated the technological advances needed to stabilize carbon-dioxide emissions and fault the group for assuming that greenhouse gas reductions will take place without climate policy interventions

The the IPCC seems to believe that this “decarbonization” of the global energy system will occur spontaneously, wrote the three, all of whom have studied climate change themselves.

Pielke is a professor of environmental studies at University of Colorado in Boulder. Wigley is a senior scientist at the National Center forAtmospheric Research, Climate and Global Dynamics Division. Christopher Green is a professor of economics at McGill University’s Global Environmental and Climate Change Center.

This assumption by the IPCC is “optimistic at best and unachievable at worst,” the authors say. In recent years, they say, global energy intensity and carbon intensity have risen in sharp contrast to what’s happened in decades past. One reason for this is the industrialization of China and India, and eventually, Africa also will add to the global warming emissions.

“As development proceeds,” the article notes, “rural populations move to high-rise buildings that consume energy and energy-intensive materials….The world is on a development and energy path that will bring with it a surge in carbon-dioxide emissions – a surge that can only end with a transformation of global energy systems.

“We believe such technological transformation will take many decades to complete, even if we start taking far more aggressive action on energy technology innovation today.”

In the same issue of nature, Bert Metz, a co-chair with the IPCC, says the authors’ claims are unwarranted. Technological change is included in the IPCC report, Metz says.

Embedded technological change has been factored into the IPCC’s “Special Report on Emission Scenarios” and its assumptions “also reflect that high economic growth normally goes hand in hand with high rates of technological change.”

Metz stands by the IPCC notion that autonomous improvements in technology will happen without specific policy intervention, that is, that technology will chase greenhouse gas emissions because of market forces already in place.

This, he says, “is the very reason to keep it [the technology improvements] separate from the additional changes that need to be realized to stabilize greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere.”

He acknowledges that the latter changes will need to be spurred by additional policies. He also states that the Special Report on Emission Scenarios “were published in 2000 and have not been tested against recent economic trends, particularly in Asia….It is possible that new realities in terms of economic growth, relative energy prices and other mechanisms will have to be better covered in [future] scenarios.”

Climate scientist James McCarthy, says he was “underwhelmed” by the recent nature article.

“The conservative character of the IPCC projections has always been unappreciated by the public,” says McCarthy, a Harvard professor of biological oceanography who was a scientific adviser for An Incovenient Truth. Among the IPCC’s fundamental guidelines is to ”never overstate and avoid being policy prescriptive,” he says. “The former has been particularly critical in retaining the participation of the very best scientists in these laborious efforts.”

The criticisms in the article, McCarthy says, “will not strike many people who are looking seriously at these problems as radical new thoughts….

The important thing is to start as quickly as we can with everything we can do simply (conservation, for example), while prioritizing strategies for investments in research and development and technology transfer that will be essential if we are to move steadily along a declining emission trajectory over the next few decades.”

The IPCC also was criticized last week at an international conference on oceans, coasts and islands held in Hanoi. In a report presented at the conference, sponsored by UNEP, scientists noted that in 18 of 64 regions studied, “accelerated warming trends are two to four times greater than the average trends reported in 2007 by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.” The most rapid warming waters are the Baltic and Yellow Seas.

This warming trend, caused by overfishing and coastal pollution, includes about a third of the world’s oceans and is stressing the marine ecosystems in these waters, the UNEP study said.

The nature article and the UNEP study are only the latest criticisms of the IPCC. Last fall, the World Wildlife Fund also expressed concern about the 2007 IPCC report which they believe left out key findings particularly in regard to potentially destructive hurricanes, the warming of the upper Pacific Ocean and the loss of glaciers in the European Alps.

At last week’s Budapest conference, members of the IPCC discussed its future, acknowledging that there have been doubts about where climate research was headed. Chairman of the IPCC Rajendra Pachauri affirmed that regular global reports will continue and will focus on studying regional instead of global scenarios and solutions.

The debate over whether the IPCC’s snapshots accurately reflect the multiple impacts of global warming seems likely to continue, as will the calls for more effective government action, until some critical mass of consensus emerges.

Climate science engineer Dr. Robert Socolow, who has argued for government intervention to alert the economics against carbon build up (in a 2005 New Yorker article), compared global warming to the past social issues of child labor and slavery.

“All of a sudden it was wrong,” he said, “and we didn’t do it anymore.”

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