IPCC – Peter Fairley

Are UN Climate Assessments Obsolete?

The sweeping multi-year assessments produced by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change set the gold standard for global scientific consensus on how humanity is altering Earth’s climate, and how to anticipate and minimize those changes. Some top climate scientists, however, are reviving a harsh critique of the IPCC’s assessment process, saying that it takes too long and that the delay could actually be creating an excuse for political inaction. The production cycle for what will become IPCC Sixth Assessment Report—began in 2015 and will not conclude until 2022. That seven-year schedule is simply unacceptable for a document that is “relied on by countless decision makers around the world every day,” said Katharine Hayhoe, an atmospheric scientist and co-director of the Climate Science Center at Texas Tech. Read on at InsideClimate News

September 9, 2017September 21, 2018 by pfairley

Understanding the IPCC’s Devotion to Carbon Capture

I’ve delivered several dispatches on carbon capture and storage (CCS) recently, including a pictorial ‘how-it-works’ feature on the world’s first commercial CCS power for Technology Review. Two aspects of CCS technology and its potential applications bear further elaboration than was possible in that short text. Most critical is a longer-term view on how capturing carbon dioxide pollution from power plants (and other industrial CO2 sources) can serve to reduce atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is looking for CCS to do much more than just zero out emission from fossil fuel-fired power plants. Continue reading “Understanding the IPCC’s Devotion to Carbon Capture”

December 14, 2014September 25, 2018 by pfairley

Sniffing Gas: White House Taps ARPA-E to Boost Methane Detection

This month’s issue of IEEE Spectrum spotlights methane emissions overlooked by the U.S. EPA’s official inventory, and the satellite-based detector launching next year to map this “missing methane.” Last week the White House acknowledged EPA’s missing methane problem, and laid out a strategy to combat it. While promising to improve EPA’s inventory, including more use of top-down methane measurement, the White House also promised federal investment in ground-based methane sensing to plug leaky natural gas systems thought to be the source of much of the missing methane. Action can’t come soon enough according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which on Monday unveiled its latest climate assessment. The IPCC said “widespread and consequential” impacts are already visible and world leaders have only a few years to change course to avoid catastrophic warning. Methane is a major contributor according to the scientific body, which deems methane to be up to 44 percent more potent as a warming agent than previously recognized. Continue reading “Sniffing Gas: White House Taps ARPA-E to Boost Methane Detection”

April 2, 2014September 25, 2018 by pfairley

Democracy and Climate Change

Here’s some elegant prose on the hopes that rest on the Obama Administration to come from R.K. Pachauri, director general of The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI) in New Dehli and Chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) – the UN body that seeks and sells scientific consensus on climate science and policy. In a statement released yesterday Pachauri elegantly explains why the election is a cause for optimism:

The presidential elections in the US have vindicated the power of democracy as the most responsive form of government of the people, by the people and for the people. In respect of policies related to climate change, there was obviously a major divergence between the position of the Federal Government and that of the people at large, state governments and the cities in the US.

President-elect Barack Obama has not only been very clear in emphasizing the need for the US to engage in global solutions to meet the challenge of climate change but also in respect of bringing about a major shift in US energy policy.

The US now has a unique opportunity to assume leadership in meeting the threat of climate change, and it would help greatly if the new President were to announce a coherent and forward looking policy soon after he takes office. There is every reason to believe that President Obama will actually do so. This should please people across the globe, because US leadership is critical for mounting global efforts to meet this threat effectively. For this reason itself, apart from several others, the election of Mr Obama is a development that should generate optimism all-round.

Pachauri’s statement was forwarded to members of the Society of Environmental Journalists by Arul Louis, a fellow at the International Center for Journalists in Washington, DC.

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This post was created for Energywise, IEEE Spectrum’s blog on green power, cars and climate

November 6, 2008November 6, 2008 by pfairley

CO2’s Bottom Line Just Keeps On Rising

Climate change skeptics obsess about the immense uncertainties that plague climate modeling. It’s not, however, all a matter of mysterious physics and chemistry. Human behavior — in this case our boundless capacity to ignore grave danger — poses the greatest challenge. No order of scientific progress nailing down the links that regulate Earth’s climate will enable certain projections of climate change over the next century because it is human behavior that controls the most powerful element: emissions of greenhouse gases such as CO2 and methane.

Today scientists with the international Global Carbon Project are releasing an updated accounting of CO2 emissions, and they far exceed the best guesses of human behavior by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). “Emissions in 2007 were at the high end of’ those used for climate projections in the last [IPCC] report,” says Global Carbon Project participant Corinne Le Quéré, an environmental chemist at the University of East Anglia.

Emissions from burning fossil fuels and cement manufacturing — the largest sources of anthropogenic CO2 — continue to increase rapidly (see graph above); in 2007 they were now 38% higher than in 1990. In total, emissions drove up the atmospheric concentration of CO2 by 2.2 parts per million last year, compared with 1.8 ppm in 2006. At the end of 2007 CO2 was at 383 ppm — the highest concentration during the last 650,000 years and probably during the last 20 million years according to the Global Carbon Project.

At the same time the oceans, which in past acted as a buffer to absorb excess CO2, are saturating. Le Quéré, who coauthored a report last year in Science that the Antarctic Ocean had already saturated, calls it a dangerous combination: “If this trend continues and the natural sinks weaken, we are on track towards the highest projections of climate change.”

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September 26, 2008September 26, 2008 by pfairley