IPCC Sixth Assessment Report, Working Group 2

For the scientific community, the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a United Nations body, is a major face of climate change.  Especially for those hundreds of otherwise uncelebrated scientists who work hours and hours contributing to these definitive documents.

The IPCC has been producing Assessment Reports (AR) on the state of world climate and climate change since 1990.  As far as I can tell, the current numbering system began with AR4 in 2006 and 2007 (each round produces 3 reports over the course of 2 years); AR5 was in 2013 and 2014; the current AR6 began with a report in 2021.  In addition to the three working group reports, a round may produce additional special reports.

So the gap between AR5 and AR6 has been about 8 years.  The first of this round's 3 working group reports came out in August of 2021, The Physical Science Basis.  This is where the most knowledgeable climate scientists in the world communicate their best current understanding of climate change and describe several possible scenarios for the future.  The full report clocks in at 1,300 dense technical pages.  The Technical Summary is 150 pages, while the Summary for Policymakers is a still hefty 39 pages, not for the faint of heart.  For the real condensed version you can download the Headlines of the Summary for Policymakers, a scant two pages.  The one word summary is, "AAAAAAGH!!!!"

The reason I am putting up this post today is that the report of Working Group 2 was just released today, entitled Climate Change 2022: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability.  To quote from the description on the report's web page, it "assesses the impacts of climate change, looking at ecosystems, biodiversity, and human communities at global and regional levels. It also reviews vulnerabilities and the capacities and limits of the natural world and human societies to adapt to climate change." So, based upon the physical science underpinnings from Working Group 1, this group says what is known about the effects climate change can and is likely to have on the natural and human worlds.  Again, there is a full report, a Technical Summary and a Summary for Policymakers, all reachable from the link above.

The point made in this report (and I have only skimmed the Summary for Policymakers) is that the science in the Working Group 1 Report, as interesting as it is, is not studied just for itself.  The projected changes in climate create climate hazards.  The various human and natural communities throughout the world have varying exposures and vulnerabilities to those hazards.  This creates risk.  Climate-based risks, and their anticipation, and the adaptations made to those risks, will determine the resiliency of those communities to those risks.

Even the Summary for Policymakers is slow going.  In their dead level scientific prose, they walk the reader through the currently observed risks and impacts, then through near-term (2021-2040), mid-term (2041-2060) and long-term (2081-2100) [whatever happened to 2061-2080?] projections, each analyzed through 5 different Shared Socio-economic Pathways (SSPs), which are highly complex (i.e. nearly incomprehensible!) projections of the likelihood of world societies having organized themselves so as to take on the challenges of climate change.

Anyway, the bottom line to me, again, only on first quick reading so as to introduce this report in this blog, is this: through the dense academic and scientific prose allowed them, the scientists are trying to scream as loud as they can,

IF YOU IDIOTS DON'T GET YOUR ACTS TOGETHER NOW, AND WE MEAN NOW, WE'RE ALL DOOMED!!! DOOMED, DO YOU HEAR US!!!




Comments

  1. Mary ApplegateMarch 1, 2022 at 8:59 AM

    Thanks for these excellent summaries of the current thinking (other people's and your own) about climate change.
    Can you create a link to allow readers to become subscribers who get a notification when you post something new?

    ReplyDelete

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