A difficult climate: Media response to the IPCC

A press release from the University of Exeter: The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) periodically releases Assessment Reports in order to inform policymakers and the public about the latest scientific evidence on climate change. The publication of each report is a key event in the debate about climate change, but their reception and coverage in the media has varied widely.

A study, published today in the journal Nature Climate Change, has for the first time analysed how Twitter, TV and newspapers reported the IPCC’s climate evidence. Understanding how media coverage varies is important because people’s knowledge and opinions on climate change are influenced by how the media reports on the issue.

The study found that there were markedly different ways in which the media portrayed the IPCC’s latest findings. The researchers investigated this through studying the frames (ways of depicting an issue) the different media sources used to emphasize some aspects of climate change, whilst downplaying others. They also found large differences in how much coverage each Working Group received (the IPCC has three, which focus on the physical science, impacts and adaptation, and mitigation respectively).

The researchers found ten different frames used to communicate climate change: Settled Science, Political or Ideological Struggle, Role of Science, Uncertain Science, Disaster, Security, Morality and Ethics, Opportunity, Economics and Health. The first five frames were used to communicate the IPCC reports much more frequently – whereas the latter frames were not used much at all.

Dr Saffron O’Neill, lead author of the study from the University of Exeter, said: “We know that some of these frames are more engaging for audiences than others: for example, the Opportunity or Health frames are both effective at linking the distant issue of climate change to peoples’ everyday life. But these kinds of frames are little used in newspaper coverage, on TV, or on Twitter.”....

Evidence from warm past confirms recent IPCC estimates of climate sensitivity

A press release from the University of Southampton: New evidence showing the level of atmospheric CO2 millions of years ago supports recent climate change predications from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

A multinational research team, led by scientists at the University of Southampton, has analysed new records showing the CO2 content of the Earth’s atmosphere between 2.3 to 3.3 million years ago, over the Pliocene.

During the Pliocene, the Earth was around 2ºC warmer than it is today and atmospheric CO2 levels were around 350-400 parts per million (ppm), similar to the levels reached in recent years. By studying the relationship between CO2 levels and climate change during a warmer period in Earth’s history, the scientists have been able to estimate how the climate will respond to increasing levels of carbon dioxide, a parameter known as ‘climate sensitivity’.

The findings, which have been published in Nature, also show how climate sensitivity can vary over the long term. “Today the Earth is still adjusting to the recent rapid rise of CO2 caused by human activities, whereas the longer-term Pliocene records document the full response of CO2-related warming,” says Southampton’s Dr Gavin Foster, co-author of the study.

“Our estimates of climate sensitivity lie well within the range of 1.5 to 4.5ºC increase per CO2 doubling summarised in the latest IPCC report. This suggests that the research community has a sound understanding of what the climate will be like as we move toward a Pliocene-like warmer future caused by human greenhouse gas emissions.”...

Fossils from the Pliocene, shot by H. Zell, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

World has not woken up to water crisis caused by climate change

Nita Bhalla in Reuters via the Thomson Reuters Foundation: Water scarcity could lead to conflict between communities and nations as the world is still not fully aware of the water crisis many countries face as a result of climate change, the head of the U.N. panel of climate scientists warned on Tuesday.

The latest report from the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) predicts a rise in global temperature of between 0.3 and 4.8 degrees Celsius (0.5 to 8.6 Fahrenheit) by the late 21st century.

Countries such as India are likely to be hit hard by global warming, which will bring more freak weather such as droughts that will lead to serious water shortages and affect agricultural output and food security.

"Unfortunately, the world has not really woken up to the reality of what we are going to face in terms of the crises as far as water is concerned," IPCC Chair Rajendra Pachauri told participants at a conference on water security.

"If you look at agricultural products, if you look at animal protein - the demand for which is growing - that's highly water intensive. At the same time, on the supply side, there are going to be several constraints. Firstly because there are going to be profound changes in the water cycle due to climate change."...

Umia Lake in Iran, all dried up in 2012, in a spot where the water was four meters deep not so many years ago. Shot by Yoosef Pooranvary, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported 3.0 license 

Adaptation, mitigation activities can control climate change – IPCC report

EcoSeed: Climate change irreversible impacts to increase, however, there are options to adapt to climate change and stringent mitigation activities to manage it, finds new Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report.

The Synthesis Report, which sums and integrates the findings of the I.P.C.C. Fifth Assessment Report produced by 800 scientists..., is the most comprehensive assessment of climate change.

“Our assessment finds that the atmosphere and oceans have warmed, the amount of snow and ice has diminished, sea level has risen and the concentration of carbon dioxide has increased to a level unprecedented in at least the last 800,000 years,” said Thomas Stocker, co-chair of I.P.C.C. Working Group I.

The document reports with great certainty than in previous assessment the fact that emissions of greenhouse gases and other man-made drivers have been the dominant cause of observed warming since the mid-20th century.

According to the report, the more human activity disrupts the climate, the greater the risks. Continued GHG emissions will further warm and create long-lasting changes in all components of the climate system, increasing the likelihood of widespread and profound impacts affecting all levels of society.

“Adaptation can play a key role in decreasing these risks. Adaptation is so important because it can be integrated with the pursuit of development, and can help prepare for the risks to which we are already committed by past emissions and existing infrastructure,” said Vicente Barros, co-chair of I.P.C.C. Working Group II.

But adaptation alone is not enough. Substantial and sustained reductions of GHG emissions are at the core of limiting the risks of climate change, as it will not only reduce the rate and magnitude of warming, but also increase the time available for adaptation....

Report rings alarm over climate change

Shehla Ambreen in the Nation (Pakistan): The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC) fifth assessment report titled "IPCC AR5 - What it means for a stronger and more inclusive Pakistan" released on Monday held that in South Asia some low-carbon development options may be less costly in the long run in terms of climate change with integrated climate adaptation, mitigation and development approaches.

Besides, the report emphasised on international cooperation as vital to avert dangerous climate change and enabling South Asian governments to promote ambitious global action. Ali Tauqeer Sheikh, CEO, LEAD Pakistan, said that it was the most comprehensive assessment of climate change ever with input of 830 expert authors from 85 countries. He said: "The report reviews the scientific evidence on the trends and causes of climate change, the risks to human and natural systems, and options for adaptation and mitigation."

...Dr Adil Najam, Dean of Pardee School of Global Studies said that everyone should step forward and take action in fighting against climate change. He said: "There is no doubt in saying that climate change is posing a great threat to the water and food security, health, livelihood and infrastructure in South Asia."

"Climate becomes unpredictable if it is messed and management of adaptation for the future will be mostly related to water, because climate of the future is very wet," he added. The report warned that climate change would have widespread impacts on South Asian society and its interaction with the natural environment. It stated that climate change adaptations were mostly going to be about changes in life style, ways of energy production and going for advanced technologies....

A man points to the level that the water came up to on the side of his home when floods swept through his village in Pakistan's Sindh province in August 2010.Shot by DFID - UK Department for International Development, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license

Has Antarctic sea ice expansion been overestimated?

A press release from the European Geosciences Union: New research suggests that Antarctic sea ice may not be expanding as fast as previously thought. A team of scientists say much of the increase measured for Southern Hemisphere sea ice could be due to a processing error in the satellite data. The findings are published today in The Cryosphere, a journal of the European Geosciences Union (EGU).

Arctic sea ice is retreating at a dramatic rate. In contrast, satellite observations suggest that sea ice cover in the Antarctic is expanding – albeit at a moderate rate – and that sea ice extent has reached record highs in recent years. What’s causing Southern Hemisphere sea ice cover to increase in a warming world has puzzled scientists since the trend was first spotted. Now, a team of researchers has suggested that much of the measured expansion may be due to an error, not previously documented, in the way satellite data was processed.

“This implies that the Antarctic sea ice trends reported in the IPCC’s AR4 and AR5 [the 2007 and 2013 assessment reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] can’t both be correct: our findings show that the data used in one of the reports contains a significant error. But we have not yet been able to identify which one contains the error,” says lead-author Ian Eisenman of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at University of California San Diego in the US.

...In the study published in The Cryosphere, Eisenman and collaborators compare two datasets for sea ice measurements. The most recent one, the source of AR5 conclusions, was generated using a version of Bootstrap updated in 2007, while the other, used in AR4 research, is the result of an older version of the algorithm.

The researchers found a difference between the two datasets related to a transition in satellite sensors in December 1991, and the way the data collected by the two instruments was calibrated. “It appears that one of the records did this calibration incorrectly, introducing a step-like change in December 1991 that was big enough to have a large influence on the long-term trend,” explains Eisenman.

“You’d think it would be easy to see which record has this spurious jump in December 1991, but there’s so much natural variability in the record – so much ‘noise’ from one month to the next – that it’s not readily apparent which record contains the jump. When we subtract one record from the other, though, we remove most of this noise, and the step-like change in December 1991 becomes very clear.”

With the exception of the longer time period covered by the most recent dataset, the two records were thought to be nearly identical. But, by comparing the datasets and calculating Antarctic sea ice extent for each of them, the team found that there was a stark difference between the two records, with the current one giving larger rates of sea ice expansion than the old one in any given period. If the error is in the current dataset, the results could contribute to an unexpected resolution for the Antarctic sea ice cover enigma.

An iceberg off the Antarctic coast, shot by Christopher Michel - 091203_iceberg_6964, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons 2.0 license 

IPCC reports 'diluted' under 'political pressure' to protect fossil fuel interests

Nafeez Ahmed in Earth Insight at the Guardian (UK): Increasing evidence is emerging that the policy summaries on climate impacts and mitigation by the UN Intergovernment Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) were significantly 'diluted' under political pressure from some of the world's biggest greenhouse gas emitters, including Saudi Arabia, China, Brazil and the United States.

Several experts familiar with the IPCC government approval process for the 'Summary for Policymakers' (SPM) reports – documents summarising the thousands of pages of technical and scientific reports for government officials – have spoken out about their distortion due to political interests.

According to David Wasdell, who leads on feedback dynamics in coupled complex global systems for the European Commission's Global System Dynamics and Policy (GSDP) network, "Every word and line of the text previously submitted by the scientific community was examined and amended until it could be endorsed unanimously by the political representatives."

In a detailed paper critiquing the WG1 Summary for Policymakers, Wasdell revealed that: "Greatest pressure to establish grounds for the highest possible budget came from those countries whose national economy, political power and social stability depend on sustaining the asset value and production revenue derived from exploitation of their resources of fossil energy. Additional pressure was applied to the political agents by those vested interests whose sustained profitability was based on the extraction, refining, marketing and use of fossil energy as the ground of the global economy."

As an accredited reviewer for the IPCC's 2007 Fourth Assessment Report, Wasdell had previously criticised the political approval process for playing down amplifying feedbacks which could accelerate climate change. That charge was strongly denied by the IPCC's lead authors at the time, although political interference amounting to "scientific vandalism" was alleged by other sources….

Public confused by risk language in IPCC reports

Savita Verma, Joshua Howgego and T.V. Padma in SciDev.net: The phrases used in UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports to convey the probability of extreme events happening due to climate change are often misinterpreted by the general public in many countries, a study says.

As a result, it urges the panel to always give the percentage chance of an event occurring whenever it uses such risk phrases. The confusion arises with phrases such as ‘likely’, ‘very likely’, ‘about as likely as not’ or ‘virtually certain’, which the IPCC uses in its reports to denote the probability of extreme events such as floods arising. The numerical definition of the phrases typically appears in a separate appendix...

The IPCC uses these phrases to denote specific probabilities. But research shows that people worldwide often misunderstand the panel’s intended meaning. The study, published last month in Nature Climate Change (20 April), surveyed more than 10,000 people from 24 countries, asking them what they understood the IPCC’s phrases to mean.

Participants were randomly divided into two groups. One was given the IPCC’s risk phrases, translated into their language. The other saw the same phrases, but the numerical risk was also presented in brackets after the words.

...They found that 27 per cent of those in the first group correctly understood the IPCC’s meaning, but this rose to 40 per cent in the second group. Most people tended to underestimate what was meant by high probabilities of extreme events occurring and overestimate low probabilities....

Latest IPCC report: Climate change poses risks to the well-being of nature and people – but there are ways of mitigating these risks

A press release from the Finnish Environment Institute: The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has approved the second part of its Fifth Assessment Report (AR5), titled Climate Change 2014: Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability, at the IPCC meeting in Yokohama, Japan. The key message of the report is that climate change poses serious risks to the well-being of nature and people all over the world. The observed effects of climate change have an impact on people’s health, land and marine ecosystems, water supplies, and people’s livelihoods, from the polar regions to the tropics and from small islands to continents. Poor countries that lack the means to adapt to these changes will suffer the worst.

...Professor Tim Carter from the Finnish Environment Institute (SYKE) is one of the lead writers of the now published report. He hopes that decision-makers will take the information produced by researchers seriously: “If adequate measures to reduce emissions are not taken, the fear is that some of the changes resulting from climate change will push us over an edge after which development can no longer be reversed. This kind of threshold could be, for example, the irreversible melting of Greenland’s glaciers.”

...In Finland, the effects of climate change may weaken the water quality of water systems, as the ground remains unfrozen for longer periods of time in the autumn and winter. Water protection efforts will have to adapt to increased run-off, erosion, and nutrition loads. This will result in new challenges, particularly in agricultural water protection. The warming o
f Finland’s climate is already evident in Finnish fauna; birds, for example, are migrating earlier in the spring and later in the autumn.

...Countries all over the world have begun to develop climate change adaptation plans and strategies. Finland has been a pioneer in this regard, and Finland’s reformed adaptation strategy is currently being widely circulated for comments. In Europe, the EU’s adaptations strategy has led to adaptation planning being incorporated into, for example, the use and management of coastal areas and water systems and the risk management of natural disasters....

Helsinki at night, shot by Petteri Sulonen, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr,  under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license 

At-risk cities hold solutions to climate change:

Suzanne Goldenberg in the Guardian (UK): It is already taking shape as the 21st century urban nightmare: a big storm hits a city like Shanghai, Mumbai, Miami or New York, knocking out power supply and waste treatment plants, washing out entire neighbourhoods and marooning the survivors in a toxic and foul-smelling swamp. Now the world's leading scientists are suggesting that those same cities in harm's way could help drive solutions to climate change.

A draft report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), obtained by the Guardian, says smart choices in urban planning and investment in public transport could help significantly lower greenhouse gas emissions, especially in developing countries. The draft is due for release in Berlin on Sunday, the third and final instalment of the IPCC's authoritative report on climate change.

"The next two decades present a window of opportunity for urban mitigation as most of the world's urban areas and their infrastructure have yet to be constructed," the draft said.

Around 1 billion people live in cities and coastal areas at risk of sea-level rise and coastal flooding – and those figures are expected to rise in the coming decades.

Most of the high-risk areas are in Asia, but the US east coast, where the rate of sea level rise is three or four times faster than the global average, is also a "hotspot", with cities, beaches and wetlands exposed to flooding....

Mumbai's Worli seaface at night

Why we can’t just adapt to climate change

John Reilly in the MIT Technology Review: This week the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released a major report focused on what actions might or could be taken to adapt to climate change. It attempts to describe who and what is especially vulnerable to climate change, and gives an overview of ways some are adapting.

...In the end, the report is a compendium of things that might happen or are likely to happen to someone or something, somewhere. But what does this actually mean for me, or anyone who might read the report? I would avoid beachfront property. If my livelihood depended on a coastal resource, I would try to find a different job, or at least urge my children to pursue another line of work.

That is where a measure of wealth brings some resilience—I have those options, others do not. The report “quantifies” in some sense by establishing an element of “relative risk,” concluding that the poor and marginalized in society are more vulnerable because they do not have the means to adapt. Beyond this, it is not clear that climate prediction is at a high enough level to offer information that I can use to take concrete actions for most day-to-day decisions and investments.

What the report does provide is some documentation of adaptation in action—what different regions, cities, sectors, and groups are doing to adapt—concluding that there is a growing body of experience from which to learn.

However, perhaps the greatest truth in the report is in the following statement: “Adaptation is place and context specific, with no single approach for reducing risks appropriate across all settings (high confidence). Effective risk reduction and adaptation strategies consider the dynamics of vulnerability and exposure and their linkages with socioeconomic processes, sustainable development, and climate change.”...

A grafitto shot by Rabanus Flavus, public domain

Warming climate may spread drying to a third of earth

A press release from the Earth Institute at Columbia University: Increasing heat is expected to extend dry conditions to far more farmland and cities by the end of the century than changes in rainfall alone, says a new study. Much of the concern about future drought under global warming has focused on rainfall projections, but higher evaporation rates may also play an important role as warmer temperatures wring more moisture from the soil, even in some places where rainfall is forecasted to increase, say the researchers.

The study is one of the first to use the latest climate simulations to model the effects of both changing rainfall and evaporation rates on future drought. Published this month in the journal Climate Dynamics, the study estimates that 12 percent of land will be subject to drought by 2100 through rainfall changes alone; but the drying will spread to 30 percent of land if higher evaporation rates from the added energy and humidity in the atmosphere is considered. An increase in evaporative drying means that even regions expected to get more rain, including important wheat, corn and rice belts in the western United States and southeastern China, will be at risk of drought. The study excludes Antarctica.

“We know from basic physics that warmer temperatures will help to dry things out,” said the study’s lead author, Benjamin Cook, a climate scientist with joint appointments at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies. “Even if precipitation changes in the future are uncertain, there are good reasons to be concerned about water resources.”

...Using two drought metric formulations, the study authors analyze projections of both rainfall and evaporative demand from the collection of climate model simulations completed for the IPCC’s 2013 climate report. Both metrics agree that increased evaporative drying will probably tip marginally wet regions at mid-latitudes like the U.S. Great Plains and a swath of southeastern China into aridity. If precipitation were the only consideration, these great agricultural centers would not be considered at risk of drought. The researchers also say that dry zones in Central America, the Amazon and southern Africa will grow larger. In Europe, the summer aridity of Greece, Turkey, Italy and Spain is expected to extend farther north into continental Europe....

A NOAA image of a dust storm

IPCC climate report warns of “growing adaptation deficit”

Carey L. Biron in IPS: The latest update of the world’s scientific consensus on climate change finds not only that impacts are already being felt on every continent, but also that adaptation investments are dangerously lagging.

These investments constitute both a key demand by developing countries and a key pledge by the West. Nonetheless, the latest report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), released on Monday in Japan, warns that these shortfalls are growing.

“Global adaptation cost estimates are substantially greater than current adaptation funding and investment, particularly in developing countries, suggesting a funding gap and a growing adaptation deficit,” the report states.

 “Comparison of the global cost estimates with the current level of adaptation funding shows the projected global needs to be orders of magnitude greater than current investment levels particularly in developing countries.”

Further, the report underscores that adaptation shortfalls, as with the broader impacts of climate change, would most significantly affect communities that are discriminated against, particularly in developing economies....

How the US scuppered climate progress at Copenhagen

Oliver Tickell in the Ecologist: Today the IPCC launches its latest review of world climate. But how to translate its grim findings into action when US is deploying its full armoury of intelligence and diplomatic dirty tricks to sink any prospect of an effective global climate agreement? The climate talks were deliberately and highly effectively scuppered by a 'dirty tricks' operation carried out by the NSA and other US security agencies - including the pivotal leak to The Guardian of the Danish text.

Today the IPCC revealed its latest information on how human emissions of greenhouse gases are affecting planet Earth, and will continue to do so way into the future. The diagnosis, and the prognosis, both make terrifying reading. We can expect declining crop yields, increasing climate instability, more extreme weather events, rising sea levels, ocean acidification - and all the rest of it.

But what really matters is what, if anything, we do about it. And despite the increasing certainty that the world is already experiencing the impacts of climate change, there is precious little chance that the world's governments will suddenly do anything effective. Last time it seriously tried, at Copenhagen in 2009, that attempt was spectacularly blown out of the water. Today we ask - how, why, and who did it?

The 2009 Climate Summit in Copenhagen was promoted as being the world's 'great hope' to secure an international agreement to tackle climate
change. Most countries entered into the negotiations with immense goodwill - even though there were always going to be thorny, complex issues to tackle, such as: how emissions cuts were to be divided up among countries; and how much money rich countries would pay over to poor countries suffering the impacts of climate change to help them adapt and move to low carbon development pathways.

But the hope did not last long. As The Guardian's Environment Editor John Vidal commented on Democracy Now: "Copenhagen was just a complete nightmare, a diplomatic meltdown, I think is the fairest way to say it, where you had countries accusing each other of genocide. You had a total failure of the diplomatic process, that text which was meant to enhance everybody and bring them together in fact did the absolute opposite, and it shattered the confidence and the trust between different countries."...

Climate change adaptation not enough - Generation Zero

Voxy (New Zealand): The latest report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) highlights the need to manage the unavoidable and ensure we are avoiding the unmanageable impacts of climate change, says youth climate change organisation Generation Zero.

Responding to the major conclusions of the report, the work of over 2000 subject experts, Generation Zero Policy Director Alec Dawson explains, "the report shows that the impacts of climate change are already being felt across the world in all continents, and predicts that there will be significant impacts for the next generation. These include serious changes to the lives of people in coastal areas, global drops in crop yields, and impacts of heat waves and and inland flooding in urban areas."

Mr Dawson; "Adaptation is essential to manage the unavoidable but we also need to avoid the unmanageable impacts of climate change. The reality is that on the world's current emissions path we are on track for around four degrees of warming by 2100. In their 2012 report 'Turn down the heat', the World Bank said "there is no certainty that adaptation to a four degree world is possible".

"Minimising these impacts depends upon a global response, and New Zealand has a huge opportunity to be a leader in taking the world away from fossil fuel use and into a low-carbon world free from catastrophic climate change."...

Richard Palmer photo of Lake Mapourika in New Zealand, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

Massive UN report says climate risks go beyond red alert

NBC News: Global warming is driving humanity toward a whole new level of many risks, a U.N. scientific panel reports, warning that the wild climate ride has only just begun. Disasters such as killer heat waves in Europe, wildfires in the United States, droughts in Australia and deadly flooding in Mozambique, Thailand and Pakistan highlight how vulnerable humanity is to extreme weather, a Nobel Prize-winning group of scientists says in a massive new report released early Monday. The dangers are going to worsen as the climate changes even more, the report's authors say, and no one is immune.

"We're all sitting ducks," Princeton University professor Michael Oppenheimer, one of the main authors of the 32-volume report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, said in an interview.

After several days of late-night wrangling, more than 100 governments unanimously approved the scientist-written 44-page summary — which is aimed at world political leaders. The summary mentions the word "risk" an average of about five times per page. "Changes are occurring rapidly and they are sort of building up that risk," said the overall lead author of the report, Chris Field of the Carnegie Institution for Science in California.

These risks are both big and small, according to the report. They are now and in the future. They hit farmers and big cities. Some places will have too much water, some not enough, including drinking water. Other risks mentioned in the report involve theprice and availability of food, and to a lesser and more qualified extent some diseases, financial costs and even world peace.

"Things are worse than we had predicted" in 2007, when the group of scientists last issued this type of report, said report co-author Saleemul Huq, director of the International Centre for Climate Change and Development at the Independent University in Bangladesh. "We are going to see more and more impacts, faster and sooner than we had anticipated."....

Canberra bush fires in 2003, public domain

Governments reject IPCC economist's 'meaningless' climate costs estimate

Suzanne Goldenberg in the Guardian (UK): Britain has dismissed as "completely meaningless" a key economic finding cited in part of the draft United Nations climate report from a dissenting author who went public on Thursday with criticisms of the report, the Guardian has learned.

Scientists and government officials are gathered this week in Yokohama, Japan, to agree on the exact wording of a final summary of the UN report – seen as the authoritative account of climate change science – before its release on Monday. Britain and other governments have been severely critical of a finding from Richard Tol, a Dutch economics professor at Sussex University, according to documents made available to the Guardian.

The summary of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report on the impact of global warming cites research by Tol on global economic losses due to climate change, which he put at between 0.2% and 2% of income. That is far lower than estimates of the costs of climate change by the economist Nicholas Stern.

Britain and other governments rejected the finding as an underestimate when the draft was first circulated to officials last December, noting that Tol did not include the potential for catastrophic damages due to climate change. "This statement … risks being deeply misleading," British officials wrote.

The US and other countries have seen a rise in the number of extreme weather events such as hurricanes and flooding costing more than $1bn. "It seems reasonable to conclude that the quoted figures of 0.2% to 2% are at best an underestimate, and at worst completely meaningless," the officials wrote....

The urgency of adaptation: Combating climate change in Armenia

Serouj Aprahamian in Asbarez.com:  The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) will meet in Yokohama, Japan, on March 25-29 to discuss its latest and most comprehensive report on climate change. ... A draft of the upcoming report has already been leaked and the conclusions are downright frightening. Increased temperatures are expected to cause major damage to all aspects of the world’s food system within the next 20 years and displace hundreds of millions of people by the end of the century. Unless urgent action is taken, the report states, millions of people will be left without food and enormous strain will be placed on global security.

Such consequences pose a particularly grave threat to a country like Armenia, with its mountainous terrain, scarcity of land, arid climate, and economic dependence on agriculture. In fact, the World Bank identified Armenia as one of the most high-risk countries in Europe and Central Asia to changing climate extremes.

Over the last 80 years, there has been a marked increase in the country’s temperature and a greater frequency of extreme weather phenomena, such as hailstorms, mudslides, and spring frosts. These changing conditions are already affecting the lives of hundreds of farmers throughout the country.

“Fifteen to twenty years ago, you could easily grow ripe raspberries here,” says Lusine Cherkezyan, a farmer and mother of four in the northeastern Armenian village of Hovk. “I would collect 250 kilos of raspberries from my plot in one day alone. But due to changes in the climate we started seeing locusts and irreparable damage occurring. It’s impossible for people to grow raspberries here anymore.”

Lusine was forced to switch to alternative, less lucrative crops such as cabbage, carrots, or beans. She has struggled to adapt to the changes and it has been tough. Like many others in her village, her husband is forced to work in Russia for several months at a time just to put food on the table.

...Hailstorms have been another major issue for growers in the country. Last May, farmers in the region of Armavir made headlines when they blocked a main highway leading to Yerevan and demanded compensation from the government after their crops were destroyed by hail. A half an hour storm alone is enough to wipe out an entire community’s harvest for the year....

Basalt cliffs in Garni Gorge, Armenia, shot by MEDIACRAT or WOWARMENIA, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported, 2.5 Generic, 2.0 Generic and 1.0 Generic license. 

Global warming will cause widespread conflict, displace millions of people and devastate the global economy

Tom Bawden in the Independent (UK): Climate change will displace hundreds of millions of people by the end of this century, increasing the risk of violent conflict and wiping trillions of dollars off the global economy, a forthcoming UN report will warn.

The second of three publications by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, due to be made public at the end of this month, is the most comprehensive investigation into the impact of climate change ever undertaken. A draft of the final version seen by The Independent says the warming climate will place the world under enormous strain, forcing mass migration, especially in Asia, and increasing the risk of violent conflict.

Based on thousands of peer-reviewed studies and put together by hundreds of respected scientists, the report predicts that climate change will reduce median crop yields by 2 per cent per decade for the rest of the century – at a time of rapidly growing demand for food. This will in turn push up malnutrition in children by about a fifth, it predicts.

The report also forecasts that the warming climate will take its toll on human health, pushing up the number of intense heatwaves and fires and increasing the risk from food and water-borne diseases. While the impact on the UK will be relatively small, global issues such as rising food prices will pose serious problems. Britain’s health and environmental “cultural heritage” is also likely to be hurt, the report warns....

Albrecht Durer's woodcut of the book of Revelation

UN report sees global warming cost at $1.45 trillion

DNA (India): Global warming will reduce the world's crop production by up to 2% every decade and wreak $1.45 trillion of economic damage by the end of this century, according to a draft UN report, Japanese media said on Friday.

The document is the second volume in a long-awaited trilogy by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a Nobel-winning group of scientists, which is set to be issued next month after a five-day meeting in Japan, the Yomiuri Shimbun reported. The trilogy is the IPCC's first great overview of the causes and effects of global warming, and options for dealing with it, since 2007.

According to the draft, if global temperatures rise by 2.5 degrees Celsius (4.5 Fahrenheit), the world's aggregated gross domestic production will fall by 0.2 to 2%, the mass circulation said. That would translate into $147 billion to $1.45 trillion in economic losses, calculated against the world's total GDP in 2012, it said.

The planet's crop production will decline by up to 2% every decade as rainfall patterns shift and droughts batter farmland, even as demand for food rises a projected 14%, it said.

Other effects from global warming include the loss of land to rising sea levels, forcing hundreds of millions of people to migrate from coastal areas, with the most vulnerable regions including East, South and Southeast Asia, it said.

The draft report, which will be reviewed in the March 25-29 meeting in Yokohama, calls for mitigation measures to reduce the vulnerability of environments to climate change such as flood protection projects and research on the prevention of infectious diseases, it said....