IPCC 5th Report: A Sophisticated Understanding on Climate Change

Newsclick talks to D. Raghunandan from Delhi Science Forum about the 5th assessment report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that was released on 30th September 2013. Raghunandan highlights three major findings of the report. First, climate change is rapidly escalating and 95 per cent of climate change is human-induced. Second, sea level and sea temperatures are more reliable indicators of climate change than land surface temperatures. Third, despite number of several non-carbon dioxide climate change factors in the atmosphere such as methane and fluorocarbons, it is carbon dioxide which is the key determinant to climate change. Also, for the first time, the report talks in terms of carbon budgets or cumulative emissions instead of annual emissions of the countries.

Raghunandan also talks about the media campaign and controversies before the release of the climate change assessment report. He says that the “climate change deniers” who question science include Fox News and several extreme conservative news groups and think thanks around the world.

Transcript:

Prabir Purkayastha (PP): Hello and welcome to Newsclick. Today we have with us D. Raghunandan who is a part of Newsclick, Delhi Science Forum and also Government's low carbon committee on climate change. Raghu, IPCC report has come out, the fifth report. Tell our viewers, what is IPCC all about. What does it supposed to be doing. What is it's role what are these reports for.

D. Raghunandan (DR): Very briefly, the IPCC is a scientific body put together under the aegis of the UN framework convention on climate change. Initially put together by the UN environment programme and the world meteorological organisation to assist the UNFCCC in arriving at a science based decisions on how to control climate change. So it is the body that brings together researchers from around the world to develop which I consider to be the broadest possible consensus of the scientific opinion because not only do more than 2000 researchers from different countries sit together and look at different subjects and what's happening. But they also then sent their conclusions out to reviewers who then send in their comments. This report for example has received more than 55000 comments from the reviewers. It includes information collected from peer reviewed journals and publications which could be more than 15000.

PP: Essentially it is the scientific community concerned with climate change which has come together constituted under UNFCCC.

DR: That's right.

PP: That's basically what IPCC this committee is.

DR: Yes, That's basically what IPCC is and it publishes roughly once in six years. An assesment of what is happening in climate change

PP:So this is the fifth assessment.

DR: This is the fifth assessment report. The previous one came out in 2007 about two years before Copenhagen summit.

PP: What happens with IPCC report. Who is supposed to be the body which looks into what IPCC is saying. Obviously, scientific community can only say what is happening. It can not prescribe what should be the actions the countries should take.

DR: The advantage with the IPCC report is because it is constituted under the UN framework convention, the IPCC report is drawn together by the scientists but the summary for policy makers which is released in the each of the three sections of the assessment reports. The first one on the science basis for the climate change. The second one on the impacts of the climate change and the third one the mitigation strategies to deal with this. Each of these three big reports has a summary for policy makers. And this summary for policy makers which is about 40 pages long is actually vetted by governments of the world, the parties to the UN framework convention who go through it as usual line by line word. So in a sense it is not only a scientific report, but it is a science report which has been endorsed by governments of the world and therefore, these governments when go to the UN Framework conventions and their summits are in a sense bound by these science findings.

PP: Raghu, IPCC has been giving a number of reports to the UNFCCC, does all the countries of the globe which are basically the large ones which really determine the climate all of them are part of the UNFCC?

DR: Yes.

PP: At the moment, all the countries are the part of UNFCC. Now, what is the recommendation of the report and how it has been received internationally and the past by government? Let's discuss what this report has to say which is different from the earlier one.

DR: In the first place, this report has been anticipated to indicate what is happened since the previous report. It is significant because it is the previous report which is really in some sense set the cat among the pigeons for the climate change two years before Copenhagen brought a very sharp focus to the problem of climate change and said that the globe is very close to the tipping point beyond which could be run away climate change and prescribed a very sharp reductions of emissions by the developed countries if this problem has to be solved and that is what then set a very urgent agendas before the countries of the world was the Bali conference of the 2007 which said we must find a solution within two years with Copenhagen. However, we know scientists came to an agreement to a far greater extent than governments of the world and Copenhagen did not produce the results and this report was therefore being awaited to see how far the problem had advanced or not since the previous report. Now, in substance what this fifth assessment report the first working which pertains to the science of climate change. What that is essentially told is three things. There has been of course misleading reporting in the press which is not surprising and always happens before every IPCC report. So the three major findings of the report are first, the climate change is proceeding a pace. It is rapidly escalating, we are getting even closer to the tipping point than we were six year back and that if this problem has to be checked, immediate, urgent and severe action is called for in this. The second aspect is the certainty of anthropogenic or human-induced climate change has been reinforced or underlined by IPCC. You would recall, in the third assessment report which was in 2001, scientists had said they were 70% certain that the climate change was man made.

PP: Anthropogenic.

DR: In 2007, they revised this to 90% certainty. This report has gone up to 95% certainty. Now, in scientific parlance, those of us who deal science will know very few things could said with 100% certainty. So a 95% certainty is as good as being absolutely certain. So that is the second major finding. Then there are some very interesting scientific findings which this report had made, and if you like I will recount those. The first of them is that this report for the first time talks of not the annual flows or annual emissions emitted by different countries, it talks about cumulative emissions of green house gases through an entire period, and underlines and emphasis the fact that it is cumulative emissions which accumulate in the atmosphere which ultimately determine climate change. So therefore, that is what we should be targeting rather than annual flows of emissions.

PP: Basically said climate change or temperature change is related to the total carbon emissions in the atmosphere.

DR: And this report for the first time therefore talks in terms of carbon budgets. One may therefore anticipate that the working group three which will prescribe mitigation targets is likely to also prescribe those in terms of carbon budgets rather in terms of annual flows.

PP: We had formed Delhi Science Forum, we had built a model on carbon budgets. So it seems that the IPCC has moved closer to what we were postulating at that time.

DR: A part of our basis for doing this was also the fact that internationally the scientific community was wearing around to the idea of looking at accumulated carbon in the atmosphere rather than in other. The second I thought very interesting that the fifth assessment report has come out with is, saying that there is perhaps been a little overemphasis in looking at temperature rise as the key indicator for...

PP: surface temperature rise

DR: ...surface temperature rise as the key indicator for climate change. And you know that even globally the target is often spoken in terms of what do we need in order to keep temperature rise to within two degrees centigrade.

PP: That is the surface temperature... average surface temperature increase of the earth.

DR: Now, what this report says is that we should not be so obsessed about average surface temperature as the key indicator. This is one among other key indicators of climate change. And this report speaks of sea level rise and sea temperatures as being and perhaps even more reliable indicator. For example, in the controversy that rose around this, there was a lot of talk about global temperatures being not warm as much as expected or having slowed down, etc. This report points out that the sea level rise and sea temperatures have shown a consistently upward trend without any of these ups and downs that we are used to with regard to surface temperatures.

PP: Also, the amount of snow covered, the glacier melt, the Greenland ice and all that is also been talked about... polar...

DR: That's right. It is also been talked about.

PP: ...as a measure of global warming.

DR: The third thing which this report talks about is that although there are known to be the non- carbon dioxide based climate forces like methane or fluorocarbons, Nitrous Oxides, etc. and they are important, this report says that the key determinant to the climate change is carbon dioxide. And that is what is really causing the change and therefore that's what required to be... So I think there are even in terms of the science some very key findings of this which mark it out from the previous ones and, to my mind, shows a growing sophistication of the understanding of the climate change, of the science of climate change and the growing maturity of the scientific understanding and predictions. And in fact if you look back from the first assessment report to now, you see a remarkable consistency and a progressive upgradation of the knowledge and increasing sophistication of the scientific understanding.

PP: Also a focus on key parameters.

DR: That indicates this improvement in our own understanding of the science.

PP: Now, you said earlier about what has been the campaign in the media, particularly claiming slow down and so on. Now, what is this campaign all about and who are the ones who are doing it?

DR: This campaign is not atypical. This happens every time an assessment report is going to come out. You get a group of people who, funnily enough, all seem to be saying exactly the same thing. Now without wanting to subscribe to conspiracy theories, it seems odd that same criticisms are levelled by the bunch of people almost every time.

PP: And quite uniformly across the globe.

DR: And quite uniformly across the globe. So it seems to me fairly clear that there are a set of people whose goal is to throw doubt on the science and therefore to throw doubt on climate change itself. They are what you would otherwise call “climate change deniers” and their objective of their exercise is to do this. You'll remember last time there was this controversy about the Himalayan glaciers melting, the leaks of some mails from the UK and so on. This time there were three major controversies that rose. The first said that global warming has not proceeded linearly upward. That in fact the last decade has seen a slowing down of rate of global warming. This report actually says nothing of that kind. The report only says that in the twelve-year period 1998 to 2010... that twelve-year period shows a slight decline in the warming rate compared to the previous decade. But the report itself points out this is because you use 1998 as the starting year. If you had used 2000, it would have shown a different trend. But because '98 was an anomalous year caused by severe El Nino effect, so if you choose a different date, results would have been different. The second thing report also says is if you choose fifty-year intervals, it shows a very clear progression of warming rather than ten-year intervals, and the report also stresses that the last decade 2000 to 2010 or 2001 to 2011 have been again the warmest ten years that human kind has ever known. That was one. The second was pertaining to the report in one part, this is may be a little technical, but the report in one part speaks about the range of temperature rise that could happen till the end of the century and goes from 1.5 up to 4.5. Rather as earlier 2 degrees to above and the report itself clarifies this that this is no major or big revision. It just shows the wider assessment that we are giving to the possibility of where temperatures could rise, but the report also points out that the lower range of 1.5 is possible only if a very stringent action on mitigation are taken which is what the climate deniers don't want. So the bulk of it is... these are very almost deliberately misleading statements and they come from the usual suspects. The Fox news, the Heritage foundation, the Liberty institute, the extreme right wing conservative foundations and think tanks in the US and the media. The daily mail in the UK which has been at the head of it, and I am very surprised to note that this time the Hindu in India also gave front page and OpEd page huge coverage to precisely these kinds of campaigns written based on a leaked IPCC.

PP: Raghu, this is one of the interesting things that has happened. If you leak the report supposedly and write, people forget what is actually being written later.

Raghu: Exactly, and only remember the leak.

PP: That this is supposedly what is being said. But interestingly, you have not covered one of the key organisations which has been involved in this climate change denial movement which is the Koch Brothers and there is a lot of money which they have put into these foundations, and today it has come out, and in fact the funding was done quite secretly, it was not public. Only recently it has been made public and they have also helped in getting a lot of money for the fossil fuel organisations who are also a part of the whole climate change denial.

DR: And who have been the oldest funders of the climate change deniers.

PP: But they used it in order to really siphon off the money into the subterranean channels which will not be visible and Koch Brothers have been one of the key funders of this. This has been discovered three months back. So effectively, it seems on one side we have a scientific community which have been looking at this and on other side we have definitely vested interest as we call them who have interest in not taking government action because it harms your profit. So this is really the conflict.

DR: What I found particularly interesting this time around the fifth report was the climate deniers used the science of the report itself to question the science. They were all quoting from the IPCC report to say 'see therefore we are saying that... the report says global warming is not proceeding as fast.' Of course, they were misquoting the report. They were using the report. Whereas in the past they have usually been 'the IPCC says this, but so and so says that and others say this'. But this time they are using the report itself to attack the report.

PP: So in some sense, a victory for IPCC

DR: I think so. I think it gives more credibility to the science.

PP: You now have to quote scientists to bash science even if the scientists are saying the opposite of what deniers are saying. All this is of course is a dress rehearsal, if you will, for the UNFCC to meet and take action. When it is that suppose to be?

DR: Of course, you have a summit coming up in November this year in Warsaw, which is not likely to do anything significant because we all know that bilaterally and multilaterally discussions between the major players in this – the large developed countries the large developing countries – is really getting nowhere. And they haven't made any breakthroughs which you need in order to reach a solution. The norm is supposed to come in the end of 2015. That's the new deadline that has been set. But we have seen such deadlines before. Bali set the deadline for 2009 in Copenhagen. Durban has set the deadline N 2015 to arrive at a solution which will come into effect in 2020. Unless there is some major consensus or breakthrough... that has not yet happened. We will have to wait and see what is IPCC's working group three report which is going to prescribe mitigation targets says and that is targeted for next year just before Paris. Whether that is going to set the cat among the pigeons or not is what remains to be seen. The scientific consensus is certainly growing stronger. The question is are we going to see a political consensus around it or not.

PP: Raghu, we are held hostage to climate change negotiations failure effectively because the US is not on-board. And the US is held hostage to the tea party and thirty or forty odd congressmen who today have stalled US budget itself, the debt ceiling. So we're really held hostage by forty congressmen in the United States, the entire climate change treaties. That's really the situation today.

DR: The million dollar question to me is if the Europeans and the other developed countries breakaway from the US-centric logic which is driving the climate negotiations, then one might just be in a position to say forget the United States, let all the other countries get together and arrive at a solution. Let us not forget, the Kyoto protocol was signed and entered into force without the United States.

PP: That's really a hard call to take.

DR: That is what may be it will come to in Paris because short of that, as you say with forty tea party senator and congressmen holding up any US action on that, you are left to the US taking voluntary action and rest of the developed countries taking binding action.

PP: Thank you very much. We will watch climate change negotiations because that's really the next item on the board and once this report is there, the action will really shifts to the policy makers. Thank you very much Raghu. We will meet again to discuss climate change as the action develops.

DR: Thank you.