The IPCC: Worth Its Weight In Gold
Acronym Required previously commended Al Gore's movie in An Inconvenient Truth or Or The Break-Up? What To See. Al Gore carried a message to the public in his movie: you have a moral imperative to act on global warming. But more important than his message to the general public may have the one to business: we have a golden opportunity here. That's the message that seemed to grab attention and excite a buzz in the investment community.
Many people reacted to the Nobel Prize awarded to Al Gore and the IPCC by talking about Al Gore -- the chances he'll run for president (nil), his turnaround from losing the 2000 election, what a great a guy he is...of course there are naysayers asking whether he cares about the environment at all or whether the environment even matters. However the efforts of the other winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, the IPCC, for assessing and presenting the science studies which underlie our understanding of climate change, for informing policy makers, and for enabling Al Gore to make his movies, deserve overdue respect and the Nobel Prize.
Unfortunately the IPCC often goes under-recognized. For kicks, we did a Google search of Nobel Peace and IPCC; vs. Nobel Peace and Gore. The result? (Needless to say this is quite unscientific) 687,000 for the Nobel Peace IPCC, and 1,120,000 for Nobel Peace Gore. While Al Gore's communication of the climate change problem was stellar and important, we should be impressed by the efforts of the IPCC, with its hundreds of scientists who convene to issue report after report, no deviation from their science charge, just descriptions of the science and its the potential outcomes.
The journal Nature recognized the IPCC effort in its editorial October 18th, "Rising to the climate challenge". Nature's editors suggested that perhaps more frequent reviews by the IPCC may be prudent to the urgent problems that we face. But the article commended the agency's report process:
"Many climate scientists would like to move away from an IPCC process in which three independent working groups that investigate science, impacts and mitigation, respectively, work almost entirely independently of each other. But the established process is difficult to avoid in drawing up a full-scale assessment, and any suggestion of a merger should be resisted: assessing mitigation is best kept separate from assessing science if only to support the objectivity of the latter.
Nature reminds us: "This Nobel peace laureate is an organization whose strengths include an understanding that, however urgent the challenge, robust scientific advice, like science itself, needs patience."
Scientists Speak, Governments Ignore, Our Peril
Last week United Nations Environmental Program also issued a report, UNEP's Global Environment Outlook (GEO-4). Their last report was issued twenty years ago, titled: "Our Common Future". The current 550 page report, which took five years and 388 scientists urges governments to pay attention to climate change, water shortages, extinction of species, and the overall resource depletion that increasingly challenges a growing population. It says that to date, governments' response has be: "woefully inadequate", and distinctive for "a remarkable lack of urgency."
Science is methodical, and policy should be necessarily separated from science. If governments don't heed the messages of scientists, or their policies in time don't stretch to reflect science, it's not because the details weren't made clear by thousands and thousands of scientists, year after year after year, or because the scientists are or are not adorned with identifying pocket protectors, or because Al Gore said it twenty years ago and he's a Democrat.
Governments fail to listen not because the report was released on the wrong day of the week or for any myriad of the many silly reasons that individuals, communities, and a few scientists themselves -- ever open to a little self immolation -- would like to suggest or accept as their burden. These are not easy problems to fix. But if the governments "don't hear", its because our leaders are funded by entities (including corporations), who don't yet see any economic advantage to sustaining the earth that sustains us. And they don't hear because the public says to the politicians it elects, hey, as long as I have my MTV -- its ok.
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Acronym Required frequently comments on environmental issues. We've talked about the subject of cognitive dissonance and willful ignorance of the environment in: Green Spirit, Cars, Buying Cognitive Dissonance, Climate Change Communication, and Sea Change or Littoral Disaster, plus some other pieces. Acronym Required also wrote about the IPCC in Climate Change, Fueling the Debate , and here.
(last edited 11-15-07)