Customer Reviews

Climate Change 2007: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability

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The second of three large volumes produced by the IPCC, the world's leading authority and source of information of unbiased climate change science. This second volume from Working Group II, as the title indicates, focuses on the impacts on human society and nature from climate change. The first volume lays out the science that has compelled scientists to take climate change seriously. This second volume is probably of interest to a smaller group of people, such as those who are interested in good background information to help develop policy or solutions to help assess and adapt to climate change.

The report goes out of its way to avoid politics and policy implications, in an attempt to be extremely unbiased. However, this rigid neutrality leads often to some very dull exposition and distillation of very boring studies. Nevertheless, the report is quite important, and I give it five stars for sheer comprehensiveness, if nothing else. One caveat: very technical, very dry, very slow reading.

The latter half of this review is an excerpt of the IPCC reports, from an article titled "Global warming: Stop worrying, start panicking?" by Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, as posted on the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences website. The following excerpt of the article sums up some of my feelings about the IPCC reports that Hans Schellnhuber put into words better than I could:

The scientific evidence about climate change comes in thousands of parcels, yet the monumental reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) are the guideposts for both experts and stakeholders. The IPCC format, perfected by the late Bert Bolin, is a painstaking self-interrogation process of the pertinent scientific community. In this process, virtually every stone in the cognitive landscape is turned and the findings, however mundane or ugly, are synthesized into encyclopedic accounts. Unfortunately, such an approach is inherently tuned for burying crucial insights under heaps of facts, figures, and error bars.

Also, by construction, the IPCC vessel tends to steer clear of value judgments that might be easily converted into "policy-prescriptive" statements. The downside of this well-meaning attitude is that the 2007 report does not, for instance, make a systematic attempt to characterize what dangerous anthropogenic interference (DAI) with the natural climate system is all about. Again, all of the relevant information is implicitly contained in the IPCC tomes, most notably in chapter 19 of the Working Group II report "Assessing key vulnerabilities and the risk from climate change". Yet even that chapter shies away from updating the "burning embers diagram" which provides a direct scientific way to gauge the political target of limiting global mean temperature rise to less than 2 degrees Celsius against avoided climate impacts.

Update February 2010: This is the IPCC report that has been in the news that "proves" to some people that the IPCC reports are full of mistakes and can't be trusted. I refer to an error on page 493 of this report (in the section on the Himalayas) that mistakenly stated "The likelihood of glaciers disappearing by 2035 is very high." Unfortunately, the author had used a World Wildlife Fund report which in turn had used a glaciologist's study that estimated that it was very likely Himalayan glaciers would disappear by the year 2350 (not 2035). This was a simple transcription error, but it definitely should have been caught before publication. As a result, certain industries have jumped on this mistake and called into question the credibility of the entire IPCC climate reports. Interestingly, IPCC's volume 1 Physical Science report of the same year contained a 45-page, perfectly valid and error-free chapter 4 on glaciers, snow and ice; and also several pages in chapter 10 on future glacier decline. So, if the author had just used the existing IPCC Volume 1 findings instead of using an improperly transcribed report, the error would not have been made. In no way does this slight error in any way negate the science behind global warming. Most journalists who covered this so-called story of "false science" that "proved" climate scientists were lying had never even seen this large volume before, let alone read a single word of it. Seriously, let's put this into perspective. One insignificant error in a 900-page dense, dense, report is not bad.