On September 27th, The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a United Nations-sponsored scientific body created in 1988 to examine the causes and effects of climate change, released a report (put together by an independent group of 800 scientists) that everyone knew was coming. The whole thing, really, can be summed by a few excerpts:
It is extremely likely that more than half of the observed increase in global average surface temperature from 1951 to 2010 was caused by the anthropogenic increase in greenhouse gas concentrations and other anthropogenic forcings together.
And:
The atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide (CO2), methane, and nitrous oxide have increased to levels unprecedented in at least the last 800,000 years. CO2 concentrations have increased by 40% since pre-industrial times, primarily from fossil fuel emissions and secondarily from net land use change emissions.
When the IPCC says it’s “extremely likely” that humans are contributing to climate change, the organization means that there’s a 95% chance of that being the case (that’s still 5% wiggle room, which is space to fit a lot of climate deniers). That’s approximately the same confidence that scientists have about cigarettes being harmful to human health.
And according to the new IPCC report–the first of a series of climate change reports that will be released over the coming year–humans only have 30 years left until our “carbon budget” is spent. In other words, we have 30 years to fix this mess before warming irrevocably climbs past 2 degrees C, dramatically increasing the risk of sea level rise, fires, flooding, and all the other nasty side effects of climate change.
But who’s actually paying attention to what the IPCC says? It’s tempting to just say that the IPCC is preaching to the choir–and in some ways that’s true.
Just a few hours after the report was released, I received an email from the conservative Heartland Institute, which was upset that “Over the history of the IPCC, each report has expressed a higher level of alarmism and a higher level of confidence in its certainty that man-made global warming will be harmful.” The Heartland Institute instead directed my attention to a different climate change report created by a climate denial group with a name that sounds suspiciously like the IPCC: the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC).
That’s a bait and switch tactic that may work with some people, but probably not the business communities with the potential to be most affected by climate change. One of those communities, obviously, is the insurance industry.