Climate Watch

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is the United Nations body for assessing the science related to climate change. The IPCC does not conduct research or run climate models. The sole, but massive job of the IPCC is to bring together all manner of observations and work around the world related to climate and environmental change.

The report released August 9 is part of the sixth assessment report since the IPCC was established in 1988 and focuses on the physical science: What’s happened, why and what may happen in the coming decades, which depend strongly on what people do or don’t do. Two additional reports will be issued in coming months as part of this assessment, one focused on impacts, adaptation and vulnerability and another on mitigation of climate change.

These reports are global in scope and draw on existing reports, so there isn’t anything dramatically new. What this report does is gather the collective scientific information in a standard way and offer some interpretation. For Alaskans, there are several points in the report worth highlighting. First, the trends we’ve seen in recent years with warmer oceans, less sea ice and higher air temperatures are going to continue. There will of course be year-to-year variations. The most prominent variations may be related to the loss of sea ice. For example, late winter sea ice just isn’t reaching the Pribilof Islands for any length of time nowadays. Another issue is that when thinking about the future, it is now completely clear that humans’ collective actions are responsible for all of the warming that’s occurred in the past 150 years. This is very clear from the graphic from the IPCC re

port. Not only is the rate of warming unprecedented, the increasing amounts of (mainly) carbon dioxide in the atmosphere from burning fossil fuels is driving all this warming.

Variations in heating from the sun or volcanoes produce only small changes and without increased carbon dioxide, the world’s temperature would be about the same or a little lower than it was in the early 1800s.