AAAS: Climate issue getting "more complicated"
Cross-posted from In the Field
A leader of the the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change told the AAAS annual meeting in Chicago on Saturday that the world's climate is likely to change much faster than predicted, leaving the world with two choices: start cutting carbon emissions earlier, or make the cuts deeper.
The comments came the morning after former U.S. Vice President Al Gore called on scientists at the meeting to help convey a sense of urgency about climate change to policy makers and the public.
"We are basically looking now at a future climate that is beyond anything we've considered seriously in climate model simulations," said Chris Field, co-chair of the IPCC's second working group and a professor at Stanford University and the Carnegie Institution for Science.
This is because the rate at which carbon is entering the atmosphere is increasing much faster than the IPPC modeled in its last report, issued in 2007. That report estimated that world temperatures could increase by between 1.1 to 6.4 degrees Celsius by 2100. But the surge in the use of coal to generate power in developing countries, combined with climate impacts on natural carbon sinks, such as oceans, forests and tundra, mean that future climate impacts will likely be more severe than the IPPC realized, Field said.
"We have higher emissions, and we have a less friendly natural system to picking up these higher emissions, and they both mean that looking forward, the challenge of stabilizing atmospheric carbon dioxide is getting more complicated than we thought it was before," Field said.
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