Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
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The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is an inter-agency programme of the United Nations, established in 1988 under the auspices of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP). IPCC's mandate is to gather scientific, technical, and socio-economic information pertaining to human-induced climate change and possibilities for its mitigation. Its major products are the assessment reports on climate change science, impacts, and mitigation, prepared in 5 to 7-year intervals; the first in 1990 (FAR), the second in 1995 (SAR), the third in 2001 (TAR), and the fourth assessment report in 2007 (AR4).
These main IPCC assessments are prepared by three separate working groups:
- WG-1 - This working group covers the science of climate change. The full IPCC AR4 WG-1 report was published online May 22, 2007: http://ipcc-wg1.ucar.edu/wg1/wg1-report.html
- WG-2 - Working Group 2 is responsible for analyzing impacts, adaptation, and vulnerability to human-induced climate change. For AR4 the summary for policymakers was published April 6, 2007: http://www.ipcc-wg2.org/ - the full report will be available here later in 2007.
- WG-3 - This working group deals with strategies and costs for mitigation. The summary was published May 4, 2007
For each working group, the final report includes a complete list of contributors and reviewers.
As the IPCC assessments have progressed, the science has become more certain on the evidence for warming and human causation. AR4 contains the most strongly worded statements so far, confirming that human emissions of greenhouse gases is causing the temperature of the Earth to rise, which is resulting in increasing changes to the planet's climate. The consequences of this include disruption to agriculture and global food supply, extinction of species, rising sea levels, loss of human habitat, increased erosion and property damage due to more violent storms. AR4 also finds the predicted economic impact of reduced emissions of CO2 through changes in energy use and production to be considerably less than the economic impact of climate change without mitigation.
Combustion of the Carbon in fossil fuels such as coal and oil releases carbon dioxide (CO2). CO2 is the second most important greenhouse gas (after water vapor), and because of its long residence time in the atmosphere, the present increase in atmospheric CO2 levels (from 280 ppm in 1750 to over 380 ppm now) is the primary driving factor in Global Warming
