The Most Important Meeting in the World

The world’s top scientists are gathering in Copenhagen this week with momentous news. You are unlikely to hear much from the big news outlets (the future of civilization’s got nothing on Brangelina after all) but the conference is expected to confirm what has been obvious since at least 2007: that global warming is happening much more quickly than predicted.

The gold standard for policy-makers has long been the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The IPCC summarizes the research of literally thousands of researchers and provides governments with the best available summary of climate science.

But the process has a major flaw — by the time all the science is collected and synthesized, by the time the IPCC gets the reports written, by the time the world’s governments vet the summaries for public release…by the time you or I get to read the IPCC reports, they are summarizing research that is several years old.

The last IPCC report was a bombshell kicking off an international flurry of public awareness and a newfound interest in all things “green.” But it was also widely acknowledged to be very conservative in its predictions, not taking into account up-to-date information such as the rate of permafrost thaw or Arctic melt. As Canadians know, these are massive changes which make predictions much more dire than the predictions the average global citizen would have heard. For example, sea level rise measured in metres, not the centimeters previously published, and temperature rise on the order of 5 or 6 degrees (2 degrees had been seen as the danger threshold).

So, in an unprecedented move,  the world’s top climate scientists are gathering in Copenhagen to make sure that the next round of international negotiations acts urgently on the best data available. Those negotiations are scheduled to finalize at Copenhagen in December of this year.

The scientific community is doing all they can to alert the world of the looming catastrophe. But the solutions have to come from political leaders — and they are accountable to the public, not scientists. Over to us….

Further reading:

• CBC: Scientists warn seas to rise faster than expected
• Times, UK: Climate scientists warn that world is heading for war of the resources
• Times, UK: Global temperatures ‘will rise 6C this century’
• Sky News: Climate Change is “Even Worse Than feared”