Water Extremely Likely Wet. Pope Extremely Likely Catholic. CC Extremely Likely Man Made.

Here’s a little known news item from an obscure organization that someone obviously is trying to hide by releasing it in a Friday news dump…oh, wait.

NYTimes:

A panel of experts appointed by the United Nations, unveiling its latest assessment of climate research, reinforced its earlier conclusions that global warming is real, that it is caused primarily if not exclusively by human emissions, and that it is likely to get substantially worse unless efforts to limit those emissions are rapidly accelerated.

“Human influence has been detected in warming of the atmosphere and the ocean, in changes in the global water cycle, in reductions in snow and ice, in global mean sea level rise, and in changes in some climate extremes,” the report said. “It is extremely likely that human influence has been the dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid-20th century.”

Going well beyond its four previous analyses of the emissions problem, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change endorsed a “carbon budget” for humanity — an upper limit on the amount of the primary greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide, that can be emitted from industrial activities and forest destruction.

To stand the best chance of keeping the planetary warming below an internationally agreed target of 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit above preindustrial levels and thus avoiding the most dangerous effects of climate change, the panel found, only about 1 trillion tons of carbon can be burned and the resulting gas spewed into the atmosphere.

Just over half that amount has already been emitted since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, and at current rates of energy consumption, the trillionth ton will be released around 2040, according to calculations by Myles R. Allen, a scientist at the University of Oxford and one of the authors of the new report. More than 3 trillion tons of carbon are still left in the ground as fossil fuels.

Australia Broadcasting (ABC):

However, in the weeks leading up to the publication of the 2013 IPCC report, climate contrarians have been working overtime publishing opinion articles full of myths and misinformation, to mislead and confuse the public about its sobering message. Most of these opinion pieces have focused on the mythical global warming ‘pause’ (more accurately described as a speed bump), which in reality merely refers to a temporary slowing in the warming of air temperatures at the surface of the Earth.

As the IPCC report notes, the oceans absorb approximately 93 per cent of the warming of the global climate. When we account for all the data, including the heating of the oceans, air, land, and melting of ice, there has actually been more global warming over the past 15 years than during the previous 15 years, with the climate accumulating heat at a rate equivalent to four Hiroshima atomic bomb detonations per second during that time.

The IPCC also notes that the global surface warming speed bump is based on cherry picking.

The surface warming trend from 1997 to 2012 is lower than the average projection made by climate models, but the surface warming trend from 1993 to 2007 was significantly higher than projections. That’s mainly because during the 1990s, ocean cycles acted to accelerate human-caused global warming, while in the 2000s, more heat has been transported to the deep ocean layers. These cycles average out over time, and the long-term human-caused global warming trend is crystal clear.

Nature Geoscience:

….many of the key quantifications of change have stubbornly remained within very similar uncertainty ranges over the set of five assessment reports since 1990. Sea level is now projected to rise by between 0.29 and 0.96 metres by the year 2100, compared to a range of about 0.32 to 1.08 metres in the 1990 report. And with a range of 1.5 to 4.5 °C, projections of the response of global mean temperatures to a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations have arrived back where they started in the first report, after some minor ups and downs on both boundaries over the course of the five reports.

This is not to say that there has been no progress. Cloud feedbacks, an issue of long-standing debate over the years, are now assessed as likely to be positive overall. Patterns of projected precipitation change, another conundrum, are emerging with high confidence: more rain and snow is expected in high latitudes, whereas the more arid regions in mid-latitudes will probably dry out further. It is also important to keep in mind that the number ranges given in the first report were based on very patchy knowledge and could quite plausibly have been overturned by further work. The fact that they have stood the test of time may be testimony to the excellent intuition of the 1990 IPCC authors — or just pure luck. In any case, thanks to almost two and a half decades of intensive work, we now know that the climate is warming, and confidence that we understand the most important causes, feedbacks and impacts of this warming is immeasurably higher.

Graham Readfern in The Guardian:

0.85 – the amount in degrees Celsius that the world’s land and oceans warmed between 1880 and 2012.

3.7 – the amount in Celsius of extra global surface warming we will likely get between 2081 and 2100 if greenhouse gas emissions stay roughly on their current path.

14 – the number of chapters in the full Climate Change 2013: The Physical Science Basis report. Australian scientists feature as authors in 11.

19 – the amount in centimetres the world’s oceans have risen between 1901 and 2010.

36 – the number of pages in the summary document.

39 – the number of countries represented in the list of authors and review editors for the full report.

40 – the percentage rise in the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere between the years 1750 and 2011.

55 – the number of countries represented in the list of expert reviewers.

63 – the amount in centimetres of extra sea level rise we will likely get between 2081 and 2100 if greenhouse gas emissions stay roughly on their current path.

90 – the percentage of the extra energy in the climate system between 1971 and 2010 that has been taken up by warming oceans.

209 – the number of lead authors who worked on the full report.

600+ – the number of contributing authors to the full report.

1089 – the number of self-appointed expert reviewers of the full report.

1250 – the number of figures (that’s charts, graphs and other eye candy) contained in the full report.

2000+ – the number of pages in the full draft of Climate Change 2013: The Physical Science Basis.

9,200 – the number of scientific publications cited in the full report.

54,677 – the number of comments made on the full report by the group of self-appointed expert reviewers.

1,400,000 – the number of words in the full report.

2,000,000+ – the amount in gigabytes of numerical data gathered from computers running models of the world’s climate systems.

30,000,000,000 – the tonnes of ice that “likely” melted from the Antarctic Ice Sheet on average each year from 1992 to 2001.

34,000,000,000 – the tonnes of ice that “very likely” melted each year on average from the Greenland Ice Sheet between 1992 and 2001.

147,000,000,000 – the tonnes of ice that “likely” melted from the Antarctic Ice Sheet on average each year from 2002 to 2011.

215,000,000,000 – the tonnes of ice that “very likely” melted on average each year from the Greenland Ice Sheet between 2002 and 2011.

275,000,000,000 – the amount of ice in tonnes per year which “very likely” melted from the world’s glaciers between 1993 and 2009.

1,339,000,000,000 – the tonnes of carbon dioxide added to the atmosphere from fossil fuel and cement production between 1750 and 2011.

2,000,000,000,000 – the tonnes of carbon dioxide added to the atmosphere from fossil fuel burning, cement production, deforestation and land clearing between 1750 and 2011. That’s 2 trillion tonnes folks.

Finally, as with pretty much all climate change science, these numbers come with caveats and ranges of uncertainty which are outlined in the report itself.

And finally finally, the report doesn’t consider the impact of all of these changes on human societies and the planet’s ecosystems – arguably the real issue. So one final number.

184 – number of days until the next IPCC report looking at the impact of climate change on human societies and the planet’s ecosystems