UN update: climate change hitting sooner and stronger
The report, Climate Change Science Compendium 2009, warns that many predictions that were at the upper ranges of 2007 IPCC forecasts are increasingly likely, and some events that were seen previously as probable over the long term are on the verge of occurring or are occurring already. “The pace and the scale of climate change is accelerating, along with the confidence among researchers in their forecasts,” UNEP Director Achim Steiner states in the document.
IPCC scientific reviewer Michael MacCracken of the Climate Institute calls the compendium a “very accessible summary of IPCC findings, which updates the science and shows what’s already happening to the environment.” Notably, he says, “past assessments paid scant attention to ocean acidification and didn’t deal with the ice-melting issue. Despite considerable scientific controversy, the 2007 assessment concluded that net ice-sheet melting would be negligible until the end of this century, and because a consensus couldn’t be reached, the report didn’t quantify these effects on sea-level rise.”
“This compendium reminds us that the risks we face may be much greater than what’s generally represented in IPCC assessments, which, by their nature, are very conservative,” adds Ken Caldeira of Stanford University, one of nearly 60 scientific reviewers of the new report. “Those assessments present only what’s agreed upon by the 180 participating countries, yet a lot of what we’re concerned about pertains to what might happen, which this report treats.”
http://pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.1021/es903062g?cookieSet=1
