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SALT LAKE CITY — A new report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, under the direction of the United Nations, will be released on Friday. This will be the first comprehensive report released on global climate change since 2007. Climate experts project the findings will reveal a more stunted impact of man-caused climate change.
The 2007 report garnered the IPCC and former U.S. vice president Al Gore a Nobel Peace Prize for their climate change research. The new report is expected to damper the original findings and give more muted data concerning overall global temperature increases.
In a recent Wall Street Journal post, columnist Matt Ridley said he was able to read some of the new report before its release.
“The big news is that, for the first time since these reports started coming out in 1990, the new one dials back the alarm,” Ridley said. “It states that the temperature rise we can expect as a result of man-made emissions of carbon dioxide is lower than the IPCC thought in 2007.”
Tom Stocker, IPCC co-chair, spoke at a press conference on Monday from Stockholm, Sweden where the report will be released. He said the new report is much more thorough than the 2007 edition and hoped it will become the definitive report for the climate change discussion.
“I know of no other document that has undergone this scrutiny and that has involved so many critical people who offered their insight and advice,” Stocker said. “This is what makes this report so unique. It stands out as a reliable and indispensable source of knowledge about climate change.”
Key points of the 2007 report, drafted in part by Gore, were later disproved. Most notably, the report claimed that glaciers on the Himalayan mountains would disappear by 2035. According to an article in the Washington Post, climatologists have since found that the glaciers will not melt completely until hundreds of years after 2035.
In Monday’s press conference, Stocker said he hopes the results of the new report will prompt a new era of environmental awareness.
“Scenarios that assume determined interventions and strong mitigation offer a chance of keeping global mean warming under 1.5°C,” Stocker said. “On the other hand, scenarios that envisage continued carbon dioxide emissions or postponed reductions of these emissions, indicate that options of limiting global warming to 2°C may become unattainable.”
