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The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is an intergovernmental body of the United Nations that is dedicated to providing the world with objective, scientific information relevant to understanding the scientific basis of the risk of human-induced climate change, its natural, political, and economic impacts and risks, and possible response options.
Climate change and agriculture are interrelated processes, both of which take place on a global scale. Global warming affects agriculture in a number of ways, including through changes in average temperatures, rainfall, and climate extremes ; changes in pests and diseases; changes in atmospheric carbon dioxide and ground-level ozone concentrations; changes in the nutritional quality of some foods; and changes in sea level.
The National Climate Assessment (NCA) is a United States government interagency ongoing effort on climate change science conducted under the auspices of the Global Change Research Act of 1990. The NCA is a major product of the U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP) which coordinates a team of experts and receives input from a Federal Advisory Committee. NCA research is integrated and summarized in the mandatory ongoing National Climate Assessment Reports. The reports are "extensively reviewed by the public and experts, including federal agencies and a panel of the National Academy of Sciences. For the Third National Climate Assessment, released in 2014, USGCRP coordinated hundreds of experts and received advice from a sixty-member Federal Advisory Committee. The Fourth NCA (NCA4) was released in two volumes, in October 2017 and in November 2018.
The Second Assessment Report (SAR) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), published in 1996, is an assessment of the then available scientific and socio-economic information on climate change. It was superseded by the Third Assessment Report (TAR) in 2001.
Jonathan Michael Gregory is a climate modeller working on mechanisms of global and large-scale change in climate and sea level on multidecadal and longer timescales at the Met Office and the University of Reading.
Stefan Rahmstorf is a German oceanographer and climatologist. Since 2000, he has been a Professor of Physics of the Oceans at Potsdam University. He received his Ph.D. in oceanography from Victoria University of Wellington (1990). His work focuses on the role of ocean currents in climate change. He was one of the lead authors of the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report.
Climate Change 2007, the Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), is the fourth in a series of reports intended to assess scientific, technical and socio-economic information concerning climate change, its potential effects, and options for adaptation and mitigation. The report is the largest and most detailed summary of the climate change situation ever undertaken, produced by thousands of authors, editors, and reviewers from dozens of countries, citing over 6,000 peer-reviewed scientific studies.
Michael Oppenheimer is the Albert G. Milbank Professor of Geosciences and International Affairs in the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs and the Department of Geosciences at Princeton University. He is the Director of the Program in Science, Technology and Environmental Policy (STEP) at the Woodrow Wilson School and Faculty Associate of the Atmospheric and Ocean Sciences Program, Princeton Environmental Institute, and the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies.
Richard S. J. Tol is a professor of economics at the University of Sussex. He is also professor of the economics of climate change at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. He is a member of the Academia Europaea.
The IPCC Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) is a report on climate change created with the help of a large number of contributors, both scientists and governmental representatives. There has been considerable political controversy over a small number of errors found in the report, and there have been calls for review of the process used to formulate the report. The overwhelming majority view of scientists with expertise in climate change is that errors, when found, are corrected, and the issues as identified do not undermine the conclusions of the report that the climate system is warming in response to increased levels of greenhouse gases, largely due to human activities.
Willard Anthony Watts is an American blogger who runs Watts Up With That?, a popular climate change denial blog that opposes the scientific consensus on climate change. A former television meteorologist and current radio meteorologist, he is also founder of the Surface Stations project, a volunteer initiative to document the condition of U.S. weather stations. The Heartland Institute helped fund some of Watts' projects, including publishing a report on the Surface Stations project, and has invited him to be a paid speaker at its International Conference on Climate Change from 2008 to 2014.
Adil Najam is a Pakistani academic and intellectual who serves as the inaugural dean of the Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University, and previously served as vice-chancellor of the LUMS.
The Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is the fifth in a series of such reports. The IPCC was established in 1988 by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) to assess scientific, technical and socio-economic information concerning climate change, its potential effects and options for adaptation and mitigation.
Dennis A. Tirpak is an expert on Climate change. He is a Senior Fellow at the World Resources Institute.
Watts Up With That? (WUWT) is a blog promoting climate change denial that was created by Anthony Watts in 2006.
This article describes the economic impacts of climate change. Given the inherent nature of economic forecasting, which involves significant degrees of uncertainty, estimates of the results of global warming over the 21st century have varied widely. Many analyses, such as that of the Stern Review presented to the British Government, have predicted reductions by several percent of world gross domestic product due to climate related costs such as dealing with increased extreme weather events and stresses to low-lying areas due to sea level rises. However, attempting to quantify the economic costs of global warming as a percentage of GDP has its inherent problems because it omits the ecological effects of climate change that are difficult to associate with a dollar value such as loss of human life or biodiversity, or those effects that will have economic consequences later on.
Media coverage of global warming has had effects on public opinion on climate change, as it mediates the scientific opinion on climate change that the global instrumental temperature record shows increase in recent decades and that the trend is caused mainly by human-induced emissions of greenhouse gases. Almost all scientific bodies of national or international standing agree with this view, although a few organisations hold non-committal positions.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has organized many of the risks of climate change into five "reasons for concern." The reasons for concern show that these risks increase with increases in the Earth's global mean temperature. The IPCC's five reasons for concern are: threats to endangered species and unique systems, damages from extreme climate events, effects that fall most heavily on developing countries and the poor within countries, global aggregate impacts, and large-scale high-impact events. The five reasons for concern are described in more detail below. The following descriptions are based on information from the IPCC's Third (TAR) and Fourth Assessment Reports (AR4), published in 2001 and 2007, respectively.
Richard Arthur Betts is Head of the Climate Impacts strategic area at the Met Office Hadley Centre in Exeter, United Kingdom. He is also Chair in Climate Impacts at the University of Exeter and the Principal Investigator of the EU FP7 project HELIX. He was a lead author for Working Group I and a contributing author for Working Group II of the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report. He was a lead author for Working Group II of the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report. He is an editor for the International Journal of Global Warming, the Journal of Environmental Investing, and for Earth System Dynamics. He was appointed MBE in the 2019 Birthday Honours.
Pete Smith is Professor of Soils and Global change at the University of Aberdeen where he directs the Scottish Climate Change Centre of Expertise, ClimateXChange.
References
- Joel B. Smith: profile on World Bank Blogs http://blogs.worldbank.org/team/joel-b-smith
- Joel Smith and Dennis Tirpak. "The Potential Effects Of Global Climate Change On The United States." United States Environmental Protection Agency, Report to Congress, (December 1989)
- Joel Smith. "Standardized estimates of climate change damages for the United States." Climate Change. (March 1996.)
