According to NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration), on Sept. 27, 2013 a U.N. panel released the first part of its six-year update on the state of climate change. The report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) states that there is 95 percent certainty that humans have caused most of the warming of the planet’s surface that has occurred since the 1950s, in contrast to 90 percent certainty that was included in the previous assessment in 2007.
Among the report’s key findings is that today carbon dioxide is at an “unprecedented” level not seen for at least the last 800,000 years. Another key finding is that sea level is set to continue to rise at a faster rate than over the past 40 years and waters are expected to rise by between 26 cm (10 inches) at the low end and 82 cm (30 inches) at the high end. Also, there is high confidence that over the last two decades the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets have been melting, causing glaciers to recede in most parts of the world, and Arctic sea ice has continued to shrink in terms of extent. We should have seen this coming, considering all the “save earth” campaigns and speeches we have been witnessing for years that discussed how serious global warming is and how its consequences will profoundly affect earth in the next few decades.
This information included in the recent assessment report is not exactly surprising to us since we have been aware of the climate change issue and its consequences for years. In 2004 Al Gore gave a speech called “The Climate Emergency” 2004 to increase awareness of the climate situation and its impact on earth. In this speech, he denoted the impacts, evidence and leading causes of climate change. He also predicted that the arctic ice cap may be entirely gone within 50 years, which is now also supported by the recent IPCC report. He viewed the phenomenon of global warming and other different phenomena as disappearance of the ocean fisheries, the destruction of the rain forests, the stratospheric ozone depletion problem and the extinction crisis as symptoms of collision between our civilization and the earth. Gore also considered the three leading causes of the new relationship between humankind and earth to be population growth, technology and our way of thinking. I agree with Gore since we, humans, represent the creatures affect earth most. Unfortunately, however, we choose to affect it negatively by misusing its resources. We later realize the consequences of such actions, climate change being the most obvious of them.
Despite the assessment reports and all the facts that relate climate change to human influence on earth, some people are still skeptical and believe that climate change is a natural phenomenon rather than a man-made one.
“I think that the latest IPCC report has truly sunk to level of hilarious incoherence,” Dr. Richard Lindzen, Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology, told Climate Depot (a global warming skeptic news site), referring to the assessment report. “They are proclaiming increased confidence in their models as the discrepancies between their models and observations increase.”
On the other hand, Dr. Daniel R. Huber, Ph.D. Biology Associate Professor at UT, agrees that humans are responsible for climate change and explains why some scientists are skeptical about it.
“Many of those who disagree with climate change claim that the climate has changed in the past, with periods of both global warming and global cooling,” Huber said. “This is certainly true. However, what makes the current situation different is the rate at which the climate is changing. Over geological time, great magnitudes of climate change have occurred over time periods usually spanning tens of thousands of years. The time period since the industrial revolution has seen comparable magnitudes of climate change over a few hundred years, not tens of thousands of years.”
Furthermore, this report is not considered a breakthrough in science since so far it is not much different than the previous assessment report. People are already aware of climate change and probably will not show noticeable reaction to the new findings of the report.
“While I think it is important to continually update and revise the predictions of climate change, I do not think that this report will cause a much more profound change then the previous report,” Huber said. “The previous report really opened people’s eyes to the problems that are occurring, and ushered in a cultural change in the U.S. where it became both trendy and economically beneficial to be sustainable. The current report will likely reinforce this cultural change, but there does not seem to be a big enough difference between the findings of the two reports to suggest that it will have a profoundly different effect than the first report.”
Coincidentally, the release of the report was shortly after the recent government shutdown. People are now too caught up with the government shutdown to pay attention to a report about the climate change. Basically, the assessment report did not give much new information as I expected, and it did not change my view on climate change, which I believe is caused by humans. It is great to achieve higher certainty about the issue of climate change and its causes, but at least, to me, it did not change much. .
Rawan Elzayat can be reached at Rawan.Elzayat@spartans.ut.edu