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Climate Change and Policy pp 91–111Cite as

Climate Simulation, Uncertainty, and Policy Advice – The Case of the IPCC

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Abstract

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is a body of the United Nations established in 1988 which has the responsibility to provide policy-relevant assessments of knowledge pertaining to climate change. While the IPCC does not advise on which climate policies should be agreed upon by the world’s nations, it does provide succinct Summaries for Policymakers (SPMs) on the state of knowledge on the causes and effects of human-induced climate change, on mitigation of the causes and on adaptation to the effects. If we are interested in how climate-simulation uncertainty is dealt with in policy advice, the IPCC is a prime location for study.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    In references to IPCC reports, aside from the page number in the whole report, the part of the report is also included: e.g., SPM = Summary for Policymakers.

  2. 2.

    The procedures and actual way of proceeding for the Fourth Assessment Report (AR4), finalized in 2007, were identical as compared with the Third Assessment Report (TAR). This claim partially derives from personal observation by the author, who attended both the TAR and AR4 plenaries (in respectively Shanghai and Paris) in which the WG I SPMs were approved. Since the specific case studied in this chapter refers to the TAR, the dates and numbers given here pertain to that report.

  3. 3.

    The quotes from the TAR plenary session are the author’s own transcripts.

  4. 4.

    This seems to have been less so in the production of the AR4. One sign of this was that the Final Draft SPM of the AR4 characterized the probability in AR4 statements as the “assessed likelihood of an outcome or a result”. Only after plenary intervention by the Netherlands, this phrase was altered to read “assessed likelihood, using expert judgement, of an outcome or a result” (emphasis added).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. PBL Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency, The Hague, The Netherlands

    Arthur C. Petersen

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  1. Arthur C. Petersen
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Correspondence to Arthur C. Petersen .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Inst. Philosophie, FU Berlin, Habelschwerdter Allee 30, Berlin, 14195, Berlin, Germany

    Gabriele Gramelsberger

  2. MPI für Meteorologie, Bundesstr. 55, Hamburg, 20146, Germany

    Johann Feichter

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Petersen, A.C. (2011). Climate Simulation, Uncertainty, and Policy Advice – The Case of the IPCC. In: Gramelsberger, G., Feichter, J. (eds) Climate Change and Policy. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-17700-2_3

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