The scientific context - Climate Change: The Facts - page 54

to natural climate hazard rather than targeting chimerical human-caused warming. Faced
with this conflicting advice, some western governments are continuing to respond to
IPCC alarmism by taking penal financial measures against CO 2 emissions (e.g. USA, UK)
whereas others have already signalled firmly that they are not prepared to enter into new
Kyoto-style anti-emissions agreements (e.g. Canada, Japan, Australia).
To attain a fuller and mature understanding of the topic, and to move the matter
forward, requires that policymakers consult and compare the two compendious and
up-to-date summaries of climate-related research that are produced respectively by the
IPCC 12 and the NIPCC. 13 Both teams of authors provide similar scholarly analysis and
summary of recent scientific papers, but with the key difference that whereas IPCC
scientists are effectively government-appointed and work in close cooperation with
environmental lobbying agencies, 14 NIPCC scientists are fully independent of political,
financial and lobby group influences.
Given this difference, and despite the fact that the corpus of scientific papers they
consider is similar, it is perhaps unsurprising that the scientists of the IPCC and NIPCC
havereached diametrically opposingconclusions aboutthehazardposedbyhuman-related
CO 2 emissions, as summarised in accompanying Tables 2 and 3.
Table 2: Selected primary science conclusions—IPCC 2013
• Warming of the climate system is unequivocal, and since the 1950s, many of the
observed changes are unprecedented over decades to millennia. The atmosphere
and ocean have warmed, the amounts of snow and ice have diminished, sea level
has risen, and the concentrations of greenhouse gases have increased.
• Ocean warming dominates the increase in energy stored in the climate system,
accountingformorethan90percentoftheenergyaccumulatedbetween1971and
2010. It is virtually certain* that the upper ocean (0-700 m) warmed from 1971 to
2010, and it likely warmed between the 1870s and 1971.
• Overthelasttwodecades,theGreenlandandAntarcticicesheetshavebeenlosing
mass, glaciers have continued to shrink almost worldwide, and Arctic sea ice and
Northern Hemisphere spring snow cover have continued to decrease in extent.
• The rate of sea level rise since the mid-nineteenth century has been larger than the
mean rate during the previous two millennia. Over the period 1901-2010, global
mean sea level rose by 0.19 [0.17 to 0.21]m.
• The atmospheric concentrations of CO 2 , methane, and nitrous oxide have
increased to levels unprecedented in at least the last 800,000 years. CO 2