4. The Cryosphere
Ice. Other than being simultaneously beautiful and terrifying, it has a huge impact on not only studies of the origins of climate change, but also the effects of it manifesting. 44 percent of the world’s population lives on coastlines, and rising sea level due to anthropogenic causes is already underway. Our guest for this chapter of the IPCC report was Tad Pfeffer. He went into detail to explain and integrate knowledge of Cryosphere observations into the bigger picture of climate change.
The most important aspect to this information is how melting continental ice sheets contributes to sea level rise, and how we contribute to the melting of these ice sheets.
1. Climate Science, meet Politics. An Administrative Primer on the IPCC AR5 Report
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has recently published its fifth iteration of a collaborative report on global climate for international policymakers (The AR5). The report is an informative, but non-prescriptive body of data that makes clear three major points - climate change is real, humans are causing it, and every moment we ignore it the problem gets worse.
Although I would not argue with those statements, I was interested to find out more about the administrative aspect of the IPCC before granting them credibility. The IPCC is as much a political organization as it is a scientific one. A baseline understanding of the administrative side of the IPCC allows for a more robust perspective into their process, a perspective I see as required as context for any scientific details. The CIRES seminar on the IPCC report provided some answers to a few basic questions I had after being introduced to the IPCC. Namely, why did it take so long to get a definitive statement on the climate issue, and why did we need five reports spanning 14 years to paint the picture? Also, how and why would the issue of oversight be the deciding factor for the soundness of report? Lastly, and what was different about the AR5 report versus past ones and why should we care about all those pages?