IPCC Finishing Massive Climate Change Report, Why Sources Say its Message is Doom and Gloom
ByThe Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is close to releasing its first report in seven years and it is expected to be one giant warning sign.
According to the Associated Press, hundreds of scientists from all over the world met in Yokohama, Japan Tuesday for a conference on the matter. The report has been leaked in pieces to this point, but the IPCC is polishing off the massive final product.
"Although it focuses on a whole analytical and sometimes depressing view of the challenges we face, it also looks at the opportunities we face," IPCC co-chair Christopher B. Field told the AP. "This can not only help us to deal with climate change but ultimately build a better world."
Japan already has the 2020 Tokyo Olympic Games in mind and will release their own adaptation of the report by the summer of 2015. It will be aimed at fostering a more "eco-friendly" lifestyle in Japan, said the country's environment minister Nobuteru Ishihara.
We aim to take full environmental consideration so that the Tokyo Games will be the 'environmental Olympics,'" he told the AP.
BBC News reported seeing a leaked draft of the report that said several adverse effects of climate change will be "irreversible." For example, the report said coastal cities in Asia are bound to deal with increased flooding and the possibility of displacement due to land loss.
"We've reached the stage where we can go impact by impact, and say is there an influence of climate change?" Field told BBC News. "We don't see it with every one but we do see it with a lot. It's a real difference. Before it was a very general concept, now it is much more specific."
An economist at the University of Sussex, Richard Tol authored the economy chapter of the IPCC report. He said in the course of the report's publication, it has changed in tone entirely.
"The message in the first draft was that through adaptation and clever development these were manageable risks, but it did require we get our act together," he told BBC News. "This has completely disappeared from the draft now, which is all about the impacts of climate change and the four horsemen of the apocalypse. This is a missed opportunity."