Climate warming faster than IPCC report says: Scientist

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One the lead authors of the landmark 2007 IPCC report on climate change says the assessment seriously underestimates the speed of global warming the world can expect this century.

The IPCC is the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a body charged with bringing together all the science on climate change it can and informing the UN member nations on what to expect. Its assessment reports are the product of five to seven years of examination of the work of more than 2500 scientists.

Chris Field, director of global ecology at the Carnegie Institution at Stanford University in the US, and elected co-chair of IPCC Working Group 2 last year, says the pace of climate change is much faster than the conclusions of the 2007 report suggest.

The key underestimate in the report are the levels of greenhouse emissions, which have grown well ahead of projections at the beginning of this decade, mainly due to rapid industrial growth in China, India and other developing countries. If correct, it makes the latest IPCC assessment, upon which governments are basing climate policies, out of date only two years after its release.

“We are basically looking now at a future climate that’s beyond anything we’ve considered seriously in climate model simulations,” Field told the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Field adds that higher carbon dioxide levels are already triggering feedback loops that are accelerating climate change. Other scientists at the meeting agreed that warming in the polar regions, for example, is starting to melt permafrost, leading in turn to the release of more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere.