The Pros And Cons Of Climate Change

Climate change as a global phenomenon becomes up for contention when the world’s leading advice-giving institute, the IPCC that was once believed to be of credible backings, has evolved into an institution hackled with doubt and distrust under external pressures. We must first understand that decisions involving climate change has always been backed by scientific advice. Data supporting IPCC’s supposedly scientific claims comes from variegated sources but the sole platform by which governments derive advice with regard to the policies they have to pass to tackle climate change has been the Assessment Reports produced by the IPCC which was a made a byproduct of the UN member governments in 1988 (Henderson, 2010). 3.1 IPCC’s Externally-Driven

The political voices of the rapidly industrializing nations of China, India and Africa are then drowned by the greater voice of the more significant stakeholders of the IPCC and UN

In the second report it contradicted itself by saying that there is inadequate data to determine whether consistent global changes in climate variability or weather extremes have occurred over the 20th century. In its third report however, the IPCC noted that over the last century, the Earth has warmed by 0.6 degrees Celsius, and the increase at least partly results from the anthropogenic release of GHGs. There were also claims made about “unprecedented” warming: “Globally it is very likely that the 1990s was the warmest decade, and 1998 the warmest year, in the instrument record (1861-2000)… The increase in surface temperature over the 120th century for the Northern Hemisphere is likely to have been greater than that for any other century in the last thousand years (IPCC, 2001).” In the fourth and latest report to date, the human role in changing global climate is described as “very likely”. In addition, the report states that “The warmth of the last half century is unusual in at least the previous 1300 years. The last time the polar regions were significantly warmer than present for an extended period (about 125000 years ago), reductions in polar ice volume led to 4-6m of sea level rise (IPCC,