[D66] Study shows IPCC is underselling climate change | phys.org

[A.OUT]

(IPCC blijkt niet alarmerend genoeg te zijn. Fluks kan nu met de billen
bloot...)

Study shows IPCC is underselling climate change
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IPCC
phys.org
2 min
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Credit: CC0 Public Domain

A new study has revealed that the language used by the global climate
change watchdog, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC),
is overly conservative – and therefore the threats are much greater than
the Panel's reports suggest.

Published in the journal BioScience, the team of scientists from the
University of Adelaide, Flinders University, the University of Bristol
(UK), and the Spanish National Research Council has analysed the
language used in the IPCC's Fifth Assessment Report (from 2014).

"We found that the main message from the reports—that our society is in
climate emergency—is lost by overstatement of uncertainty and gets
confused among the gigabytes of information," says lead author Dr.
Salvador Herrando-Pérez, from the University of Adelaide's Environment
Institute and Australian Centre for Ancient DNA.

"The IPCC supports the overwhelming scientific consensus about human
impact on climate change, so we would expect the reports' vocabulary to
be dominated by greater certainty on the state of climate science—but
this is not the case."

The IPCC assigns a level of certainty to climate findings using five
categories of confidence and ten categories of probability. The team
found the categories of intermediate certainty predominated, with those
of highest certainty barely reaching 8% of the climate findings evaluated.

"The accumulation of uncertainty across all elements of the
climate-change complexity means that the IPCC tends to be conservative,"
says co-author Professor Corey Bradshaw, Matthew Flinders Fellow in
Global Ecology at Flinders University. "The certainty is in reality much
higher than even the IPCC implies, and the threats are much worse."

"Uncertainty is to science what the score is to music—but it's a
two-edged sword: what the IPCC and the majority of the scientific
community regard as a paradigm of rigour and transparency is exactly
what the 'merchants of doubt' put forward as a weakness," says Dr.
Herrando-Pérez.

"However, climatic uncertainties are nothing but an expression of the
climate risks we face, and should inspire action rather than indifference."

The team says the IPCC reports should incorporate a clear connection
between the certainty of thousands of scientific findings and the
certainty that humans are vastly altering the Earth's climate. The team
recommends a new IPCC working group of communication specialists to
oversee the language and effective dissemination, and convey the message
accurately.

"Our evolutionary history tells us Earth will ultimately survive more
aridity, more hurricanes, more floods, more sea-level rise, more
extinctions and degraded ecosystems, but our society as we know it today
might not unless we clearly articulate the magnitude of the threat it
poses," says Dr. Herrando-Pérez.

More information: Salvador Herrando-Pérez et al. Statistical Language
Backs Conservatism in Climate-Change Assessments, BioScience (2019).
DOI: 10.1093/biosci/biz004

Provided by: University of Adelaide