What you need to know about the IPCC

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Au fil des années, ses détracteurs ont souvent vu le Groupe d’experts intergouvernemental sur l’évolution du climat (GIEC, ou IPCC en Anglais) comme un groupe associé aux mouvements écologists, en tout cassement à la gà qué associé right. However, she was born in 1988, under the governments of US President Ronald Reagan, and UK Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher.

Then the accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere began to worry the international community. This awareness would lead to the first top of the earth, held in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, where the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change will be signed. Under this agreement, all the countries of the world have met every year, since 1995, at the “Conference of the Parties”, or COP.

Six reports since its inception

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is known for its reports, which are published every 5-7 years. The sixth, like previous editions, was divided into 3 volumes, each with its own “working set”:

• The first focuses on the scientific foundations of climate change
• The second assesses the effects, adaptive capacities, and vulnerabilities of the population
• The third is devoted to studying solutions or mitigation measures capable of reducing future impacts.

The three volumes of the Sixth Report were published in August 2021 and February and April 2022.

its size

The first volume of the sixth report alone is 3900 pages long. More than 230 scientists from 66 countries contributed. Contains 14,000 references to scientific articles.

The second volume is 3,600 pages long, requires the collaboration of 270 authors from 67 countries and contains 34,000 references to peer-reviewed scholarly articles.

Authors are selected on various grounds such as experience, but also experience, nationality and gender – although the IPCC already has been critical In this regard. Of the 3,598 applications received for the fifth report, 831 were selected.

What the IPCC reports is not

The reports are not controlled by politicians, as longtime climate change deniers have claimed. Each volume is accompanied by a “Summary for Policy Makers”: the most recent was about 40 pages. These summaries are reviewed in plenary by delegations from 195 member countries. It must be approved line by line by these delegates. In fact, their content often changes until the last minute to ensure consensus. Once a text is signed, the government cannot go back and challenge its content.

But the reports themselves fall to the scientific experts who contributed to them.

Another misconception: The IPCC is not creating new knowledge about climate change. Instead, its experts aim to aggregate available information from scientific publications, then assess its strength. Thus more than 52,000 comments were made on the first part of the Fifth Report alone.

In other words, it is a massive review of the scientific literature on climate.

do you know that

• The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change co-received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007 for its efforts to “increase and disseminate knowledge about human-caused climate change, thereby laying the foundations for policies to be implemented to counter its effects”.
• The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change relies on the World Meteorological Organization and the United Nations Environment Programme. This independent intergovernmental body in this sense is a hybrid entity, i.e. scientific and political.
• he has On a mission “To assess, without bias and in a systematic, clear and objective manner, the scientific, technical and socio-economic information necessary to better understand the risk bases associated with human-induced climate change,” in the form of comprehensive information reports.
• The scientists who participate in this work are volunteers. They often have to find financing in order to fund their mission expenses.

What’s new in the sixth report?

Since the release of the fifth report seven years ago:

• Disasters are increasingly common.
• This increase is attributed, in a large number of cases, to human activity, which is now an “unequivocal” conclusion;
• Most trends and predictions were confirmed, or understated;
• The situation has worsened.

In addition, for the first time, the IPCC is aware of the effects of misinformation on the fight against climate change. It revolves around a study conducted by the American sociologist Robert Brule in 2018. Which is estimated to be 2 billion US dollars It was spent on lobbying the US Congress to influence climate policy decisions between 2000 and 2016.

Photo: IPCC / Flickr