IPCC Fourth Assessment Report
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IPCC Releases New Assessment Report on
The Science of Climate Change
On February 2, 2007, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released a summary of the current science of climate change. The summary, directed at policymakers, is based on six years of review of scientific literature by experts from around the world, convened under the auspices of the IPCC’s Working Group I. The summary is the first portion to be released from the IPCC's Fourth Assessment Report. Subsequent portions will be released later this year.
According to the IPCC, the report from Working Group I on the science of climate change answers:
- What progress has been made in understanding and attributing climate change?
- What do observations of the atmosphere, oceans, sea level, snow and ice tell us?
- How has climate been behaving in the last hundreds of thousands of years?
- Which are the projections of future changes?
For the full report, visit the IPCC website. For a summary of the report, click here (pdf).
Scientists from all over the world contributed to the findings discussed in the Fourth Assessment Report. For more information on the work of some of these scientists, visit: National Center for Atmospheric Research.
About the IPCC
In 1988, recognizing the problem of global warming, two UN agencies, the World Meteorological Organization and the United Nations Environment Programme, established the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The IPCC does not conduct independent research, rather it convenes climate experts from around the world every five to seven years in order to synthesize the latest climate research findings in peer reviewed and published scientific/technical literature. Visit the IPCC website: www.ipcc.ch.
About the Fourth Assessment Report
The IPCC issued comprehensive assessments in 1990, 1996, and 2001; its Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) will be released in installments during 2007. The Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) will be the most comprehensive synthesis of climate change science to date. Experts from more than 130 countries are contributing to this assessment, which represents six years of work. More than 450 lead authors have received input from more than 800 contributing authors, and an additional 2,500 experts reviewed the draft documents.
AR4 will comprise three sections, or working groups, that deal with the scientific basis of global warming (Working Group I), its consequences (Working Group II), and options for slowing the trend (Working Group III). The IPCC will release summaries of the three working group documents over the course of 2007, culminating in the publication of the final “synthesis report” at the end of the year.