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Facts and News
Statement on the Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report
The Royal Meteorological Society’s statement on the
Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change’s
Fourth Assessment Report
Download statement as pdf
The Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) of the Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is unequivocal in its conclusion that climate change is happening and that humans are contributing significantly to these changes. The evidence, from not just one source but a number of different measurements, is now far greater and the tools we have to model climate change contain much more of our scientific knowledge within them. The world’s best climate scientists are telling us its time to do something about it.
Carbon Dioxide is such an important greenhouse gas because there is an increasing amount of it in the atmosphere from the burning of fossil fuels and it stays in the atmosphere for such a long time; a hundred years or so. The changes were are seeing now in our climate are the result of emissions since industrialisation and we have already set in motion the next 50 years of global warming – what we do from now on will determine how worse it will get.
What the Fourth Assessment Report is also telling us is that there is still a job for the scientists to do in developing our understanding of what’s happening on the regional and local scale and to advise the politicians more specifically on what levels of emissions we should be aiming to reduce towards and what the associated risks of this are. We need to understand more clearly the impact of the carbon cycle on the changes we expect to see in our environment and we need to use this information to help us plan to adapt to the changes that we will have to face up to.
It is important that Government continues to invest in this
science and in the infrastructure to support it. High quality scientific advice
depends not just on high quality climate scientists, but also on high quality
super-computing resources. The return on this investment is potentially massive.
For instance, if we could make improvements to our local climate predictions
for the UK such that we were able to reduce the costs of the upgrade to the
Thames Barrier by 1%, then we would save £250m of public money –
and this is just one of many examples.
It is easy to be negative in the face of all the doom and gloom that surrounds the climate change debate, but it’s a problem that humans are creating and so which humans can tackle. If we are to meet the Government’s long term targets for 2050, it requires short term action – it is what we do in the next ten years that matters. The proposed Climate Change Bill will be the first time that targets for tackling climate change are formalised in our legislation and offers a real opportunity, not just to think about long term percentage targets, but the more important question of shorter term targets for reducing the accumulation of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere – the Royal Meteorological Society will be pressing the Government hard on this issue.
We cannot rely on technological changes and new methods of energy supply to solve all the problems on these timescales. They are clearly part of the solution, but we also need to address energy demand. It really isn’t an insurmountable problem and individuals need not feel powerless when tackling the problem of climate change.
It might seem a difficult global problem that only countries like the US and China can resolve. They are clearly part of the solution, and attitudes in both these countries are changing, but people across the UK and Europe can also make a significant difference. The moral argument is a powerful one in its own right and it is hard to expect others to act if we are not prepared to do so ourselves; but there is also an economic rationale. Aside from the economics of the Stern Report, which states that the cost of mitigating climate impacts are 1% of GDP compared to the 5-20% of GDP through not acting, there is an opportunity for the UK to show that it is possible to have economic growth and a reduced-carbon economy. This can only happen if businesses and the community at large take action.
The Royal Meteorological Society has set itself the target of reducing its own greenhouse gas emissions to at least meet UK targets of a 20% by 2010. We are asking others, such as businesses and the public everywhere, not just to sit back and see what happens, but to join us in meeting this challenge and to share with us successes and innovative solutions.
It sounds very trite to say it, but we are only custodians
of our planet for the generations that follow us. We should take care to manage
our relationship with the only planet known to be capable of sustaining human
life.
Professor Paul Hardaker
Chief Executive
News published: Wednesday, 14th February 2007 10.00 am