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James Hansen: To Understand and Protect the Home Planet
To Understand and Protect the Home Planet (PDF)27 October 2023
James Hansen
Global Warming in the Pipeline will be published in Oxford Open Climate Change of Oxford University Press next week. The paper describes an alternative perspective on global climate change – alternative to that of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which provides scientific advice on climate change to the United Nations.
Our paper may be read as being critical of IPCC. But we have no criticism of individual scientists, who include world-leading researchers volunteering their time to produce IPCC reports. Rather we are questioning whether the IPCC procedure and product yield the advice that the public, especially young people, need to understand and protect their home planet.
Discussion of our paper will likely focus on differences between our conclusions and those of IPCC. I hope, however, that it may lead to consideration of some basic underlying matters.
Three-pronged analysis. IPCC climate analysis leans heavily on GCMs (global climate models), too heavily in my opinion. We prefer a comparable weight on (1) information from Earth’s paleoclimate history, (2) GCMs, and (3) observations of ongoing climate processes and climate change. This 3-pronged approach can result in rather complex papers, but, so, too, is the real-world complex. We use this 3-pronged approach in both the heavily peer-reviewed paper, “Ice Melt, Sea Level Rise, and Superstorms,” published in 2016 and in our present “Global Warming in the Pipeline” (these papers hereinafter abbreviated as Ice Melt and Pipeline, respectively). Below I note specific travails and consequences for the Ice Melt paper that resulted from the fact that our 3-pronged approach differed from that of IPCC. I hope that some explanation here may help avoid a similar fate for Pipeline, as the world is running short on time to develop a strategy to preserve a propitious climate for today’s young people and their children.
…
James Hansen
Global Warming in the Pipeline will be published in Oxford Open Climate Change of Oxford University Press next week. The paper describes an alternative perspective on global climate change – alternative to that of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which provides scientific advice on climate change to the United Nations.
Our paper may be read as being critical of IPCC. But we have no criticism of individual scientists, who include world-leading researchers volunteering their time to produce IPCC reports. Rather we are questioning whether the IPCC procedure and product yield the advice that the public, especially young people, need to understand and protect their home planet.
Discussion of our paper will likely focus on differences between our conclusions and those of IPCC. I hope, however, that it may lead to consideration of some basic underlying matters.
Three-pronged analysis. IPCC climate analysis leans heavily on GCMs (global climate models), too heavily in my opinion. We prefer a comparable weight on (1) information from Earth’s paleoclimate history, (2) GCMs, and (3) observations of ongoing climate processes and climate change. This 3-pronged approach can result in rather complex papers, but, so, too, is the real-world complex. We use this 3-pronged approach in both the heavily peer-reviewed paper, “Ice Melt, Sea Level Rise, and Superstorms,” published in 2016 and in our present “Global Warming in the Pipeline” (these papers hereinafter abbreviated as Ice Melt and Pipeline, respectively). Below I note specific travails and consequences for the Ice Melt paper that resulted from the fact that our 3-pronged approach differed from that of IPCC. I hope that some explanation here may help avoid a similar fate for Pipeline, as the world is running short on time to develop a strategy to preserve a propitious climate for today’s young people and their children.
…
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