Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change: Fifth Assessment Report: The Physical Science Basis (2013)

The first of three parts of the Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) focuses on the scientific evidence behind climate change and the human role in it. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has been meeting in Stockholm this week to discuss the final wording of the summary of Working Group One (WG1), which assesses the physical science, such as concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, temperature rises and climate models. It has been written the world’s top climate scientists – 209 lead authors and 50 editors from 39 countries. This summary report will be followed by Working Group I’s full in-depth report on Monday, 30 September.

Set up in 1988, the IPCC is a United Nations body that evaluates the state of climate science. It produces major assessments every five-seven years. The last report, published in Paris in 2007, said that scientists were 90% certain that humans were responsible for global warming. The panel was awarded the Nobel peace prize in the same year, shared jointly with former US vice–president, Al Gore.

Working Group II’s report on Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability is scheduled to be released in mid March 2014, followed by Working Group III’s Mitigation of Climate Change in early April 2014. AR5 Synthesis Report (SYR) will be released in October 2014.

AR5 Media Portal
UN_ClimateTalks at Twitter
IPCC at Twitter
IPCC Fifth Assessment Report at Wikipedia
Live coverage by The Guardian (27 September)
Global warming likely to breach 2C threshold, climate scientists conclude (summary by Fiona Harvey for The Guardian)
FAQs answered by Adam Vaughan (The Guardian)

Report summary (28 pp, 2 MB, updated on 2015-2-6)
Full report (1535 pp, 375 MB, updated on 2015-2-6)
Press release (27 September 2013)
Other formats and translations (added on 2015-2-6)

Paul N. Edwards: A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming (2010)

“Global warming skeptics often fall back on the argument that the scientific case for global warming is all model predictions, nothing but simulation; they warn us that we need to wait for real data, “sound science.” In A Vast Machine Paul Edwards has news for these doubters: without models, there are no data. Today, no collection of signals or observations–even from satellites, which can “see” the whole planet with a single instrument–becomes global in time and space without passing through a series of data models. Everything we know about the world’s climate we know through models. Edwards offers an engaging and innovative history of how scientists learned to understand the atmosphere–to measure it, trace its past, and model its future.

Edwards argues that all our knowledge about climate change comes from three kinds of computer models: simulation models of weather and climate; reanalysis models, which recreate climate history from historical weather data; and data models, used to combine and adjust measurements from many different sources. Meteorology creates knowledge through an infrastructure (weather stations and other data platforms) that covers the whole world, making global data. This infrastructure generates information so vast in quantity and so diverse in quality and form that it can be understood only by computer analysis–making data global. Edwards describes the science behind the scientific consensus on climate change, arguing that over the years data and models have converged to create a stable, reliable, and trustworthy basis for the reality of global warming.”

Publisher MIT Press, 2010
Infrastructures Series
ISBN 0262013924, 9780262013925
xxvii+518 pages

Reviews: Noel Castree (American Scientist, 2010), Ronald E. Doel (American Historical Review, 2011), Myles Allen (Nature, 2010), Richard C.J. Somerville (Science, 2011), Gabriele Gramelsberger (Minerva, 2012), McKenzie Wark (White Review, 2014).

Author
Publisher

PDF, PDF (updated on 2018-11-4)
Companion website (added on 2018-11-4)

Andrea Gleiniger, Angelika Hilbeck, Jill Scott (eds.): Transdiscourse 1: Mediated Environments (2011)

– Encourages critical reflections that shed light on how combinations of art, architecture, technology and science could directly impact urban societies and their rural alternative
– Discusses the know-how-transfer between the arts and the sciences is facilitated

Mediated Environments addresses the problem that society interprets our environment through conditioned and constructed representations of mainstream media and not in a transdisciplinary way with the help of artists, architects, filmmakers, cultural theorists and scientists. The writers who come from these various backgrounds all wish to give media artists, designers and writers a new role in relation to the pressing issues of urban and rural life: ones that can address the challenges of human psychology, recycling, agricultural production, climate chaos and energy conservation. The main aims were to focus on the potentials of creative work to raise public awareness and to find new discourses that can be shared within the areas of mediated architecture, eco art, experimental documentary film, eco-emergent design and art and science collaborations. The editors believe that a closer transdisciplinary working relationship could encourage a more tangible approach to these problems of the future.

Publisher Springer, 2011
Producer Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK)
ISBN 3709102871, 9783709102879
216 pages

publisher
google books

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