IPCC Report Coming Saturday: Surprise - Grim News

The news has been floating around for some time now that the synthesis report from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is not going to make for easy reading. The report has been five years in the making. The synthesis is dedicated to combining what we've already seen in the three previous IPCC reports released earlier this year: on the science of global warming, on adaptation, and on mitigation. As Elizabeth Rosenthal points out in The New York Times:  

Even though the synthesis report is more alarming than its predecessors, some researchers believe that it still understates the trajectory of global warming and its impact. The I.P.C.C.’s scientific process, which takes five years of study and writing from start to finish, cannot take into account the very latest data on climate change or economic trends, which show larger than predicted development and energy use in China.

"The world is already at or above the worst case scenarios in terms of emissions," said Gernot Klepper, of the Kiel Institute for World Economy in Kiel, Germany. "In terms of emissions, we are moving past the most pessimistic estimates of the I.P.C.C., and by some estimates we are above that red line."

Doug Struck at the Washington Post writes:

Global warming is destroying species, raising sea levels and threatening millions of poor people, the United Nations' top scientific panel will say [Saturday] in a report that U.N. officials hope will help mobilize the world into taking tougher actions on climate change.

The report argues that only firm action, including putting a price on carbon dioxide emissions, will avoid more catastrophic events. Those actions will take a small part of the world's economic growth but will be substantially less than the costs of doing nothing, the report will say.

The report ... will be key ammunition as world leaders meet in Bali next month to try to draft a global plan to deal with Earth's rising temperatures after the Kyoto Protocol expires in 2012. The United Nations and many countries favor strong mandatory reductions of the greenhouse gases that drive global warming; the Bush administration wants voluntary measures and wants developing countries to share the burden of cuts

The grim news is not news to climate bloggers here at Daily Kos and throughout wwwLand. For instance, Uncle Bob writes in his Diary about the recent meeting at Cambridge on "geoengineering" - major messing with the atmosphere to reduce global warming:

To put this in perspective, scientists are fundamentally conservative.  I obviously don't mean this politically (head-in-the-sand, narcissistic, hypocritical jingoists), but logically (show me the data, I won't believe you until you can prove it). That is in part why the IPCC has been so far off in projecting climate change; it's very conservative.  So when scientists start talking about being scared about what's happening and point out the enormous risks of bioengineering I can't help but develop a profound sense of unease.  This is especially true for geoengineering projects, some of which are being touted by commercial players whose interest in being correct is far less than their interest in making money.

Just to prove that it's not ONLY the Cheney-Bush regime that's taking the numb-brain approach on this matter, The Guardian is reporting:

The government department spearheading the fight against climate change is planning an emergency package of at least £300m of cuts covering key environmental services, the Guardian has learned.

Frontline agencies tackling recycling, nature protection, energy saving, carbon emissions and safeguarding the environment are all being targeted in the package which is being drawn up by Helen Ghosh, the top civil servant at the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. ...

The disclosure of the Defra cuts plan will embarrass Gordon Brown, who is expected next week to give a major speech on climate change, recommitting Britain to supplying a fifth of its energy requirements from renewables by 2020. Previously government officials had said Britain would struggle to meet the target and lobbied to be allowed to use different statistics.

As the cliché has it, don't tell me how committed you are to a policy, show me your budget.