Established in 1988 by the United Nations Environment Programme, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is an international scientific body mandated to provide international policy makers, and others, with objective scientific information on Global Climate Change. The IPCC has since provided 4 major “Assessment Reports detailing the state of the scientific knowledge on climate change (1990, 1995, 2001 and 2007), with each assessment including a volume from each of three subject-oriented working groups and a summary for decision makers.
The IPCC does not conduct scientific research, but rather reviews the data collected by other scientific research projects. The 2007 Assessment took 6 years to review the data from over 29,000 separate research projects. The “Climate Change 2007” results were condensed into 3 volumes of approximately 900 pages, and one shorter summary document, by a team of over 1250 lead editors and scientific authors, and reviewed by over 2500 scientific experts from over 130 nations. All reports are available to the public on the internet at www.ipcc.ch.
By its mandate, the IPCC must present decision-makers with conclusions of scientific fact, rather the mere presentation of data. All conclusions presented by the IPCC include a verbal “qualifiers” (“likely”, “very likely”) that represent the consensus of the authors and reviewers. Thus while individual authors or reviewers may agree, or disagree, with a specific conclusion, all must agree about the probably of correctness. In this manner a “consensus of scientific opinion” is reached.
Without doubt the IPCC reviews are one of the largest international scientific endeavors undertaken by mankind, and the IPCC methodology ensures the highest level of scientific creditability. Consequently much of our climate change information is based on these consensus scientific reports. And, when the first conclusion of the Climate Change 2007: Summary for Decisionmakers is: “Warming of the climate system is unequivocal, as is now evident from observations of increases in global average air and ocean temperatures, widespread melting of snow and ice, and rising global average sea level” we might be well advised to accept this conclusion and apply ourselves to reducing our carbon impact and adapting to a new climatic regime.
