Climate change: what science and the IPCC report has to say

Nick Eyre and Myles Allen give a talk for the Oxford Martin School on climate change and the IPCC report. One of the key objectives of the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), completed in 2014, was to provide a comprehensive description of the science of climate change and options for adaptation and mitigation for negotiators preparing for the Paris Conference in 2015. IPCC authors Myles Allen and Nick Eyre will explain the IPCC process, and ask whether this model of a technical panel giving “policy relevant, not policy prescriptive” advice to governments is still working. They will highlight some key findings, such as the increased level of confidence that human influence is the dominant cause of the warming observed since the mid-20th-century, the importance of cumulative carbon dioxide emissions, the challenges of emission reductions, but also the multiple mitigation pathways still open for achieving the goal of limiting warming to 2oC. They will also discuss some of the things the IPCC does not do, such as specifically attributing blame for observed climate change impacts, and ask what the options are for the IPCC going forward.