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Thursday 18 June 2009 (updated Monday 22 June 2009)

RAPID ROUNDUP: Copenhagen climate synthesis report - Experts respond

A new report compiling research presented at a science congress in Copenhagen in March says recent observations are approaching the upper limit predictions of the 2007 United Nation's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report. Written for the non-specialists, the report is based on 1,600 scientific contributions made to the scientific congress “Climate change: Global Risks, Challenges & Decisions” aheld in Copenhagen earlier this year.

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Associate Professor Nathan Bindoff is a physical oceanographer and Director of the Tasmanian Partnership for Advanced Computing (TPAC). Partners include the University of Tasmania, CSIRO Marine & Atmospheric Research and the Antarctic Climate and Ecosystems CRC. He was a Coordinating Lead Author of the IPCC AR4 Working Group 1 chapter on oceanic climate change and sea level observations (Chapter 5).

"My over-riding feeling from the scientific congress in march 2009 in Copenhagen was the extraordinary impacts of climate change on ecosystems (including forests), economics and human health. All of these areas are outside my specialist knowledge. Aspects of the earth system will be affected and in surprising ways and this growth in understanding the consequences of climate change on key areas is accelerating. This synthesis report brings many of these facets of climate change into short and readable document, that can be backed by experts in the respective fields. The report is positive, providing both examples of the consequences of unmitigated climate change and potential solutions."




Professor Kevin Parton is at the Institute for Land, Water and Society at Charles Sturt University.

"This Report presents climate scientists with little new information.However, it is still an important milestone. It presents a summary in an integrated manner of the current state of knowledge on climate change.It also analyses likely consequences, and reveals some dire consequences if governments fail to act.

The evidence presented reveals that climate change is tracking near the upper limit of previous IPCC projections. It shows that we are unlikely to avoid global temperature increases of less than 2 degrees C, and even at this level there could be massive social and environmental disruption.

The Report focuses on the consequences of the Greenland ice sheet reaching a critical level of melting, and the rapid sea level changes that would result. However, it goes much further than examining the environmental consequences, by revealing the extent of social disruption that is likely to result, particularly in the developing world. It also suggests that security and health impacts will be unavoidable.

The Report is timely, given that it might have the effect of focusing attention of both politicians and the general public prior to the Copenhagen Climate Conference at the end of the year.  International agreement is of course a requirement, including establishing mechanisms to get carbon trading at appropriate prices.  As many previous analyses have shown, this will not be costly in terms of overall world growth as long as global action is taken now. "