Jennifer Marohasy

a forum for the discussion of issues concerning the natural environment

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Finding Figures Quoted in Media in IPCC Report Released Today

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WORKING Group II, of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), published their contribution to the Fifth Assessment Report earlier today. The summary document begins by explaining that human interference with the climate system is occurring and climate change poses risks for humans and natural systems. The report goes on to assess the impacts, how we can adapt and why we are vulnerable.

Within an hour of the reports release the Australian Broadcasting Corporation had an article quoting CSIRO’s Dr Mark Howden…

“The world’s leading climate science organisation – the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) – has released its fifth report and warns the world is ill-prepared for risks from a changing climate.

The CSIRO’s Dr Mark Howden, who was lead author on the chapter addressing food production and food security, says the report predicts a rainfall reduction of 20 to 40 per cent in parts of southern Australia in coming decades, while rainfall will be more variable in the north.”

I need to file my The Land column this evening and I would like to put the 20 to 40 percent reduction in some context relative to the rest of the report. But I can’t find these figures in the report.

It’s a long report with many components. Can someone help me…

http://ipcc-wg2.gov/AR5/report/final-drafts/

In particular where does it say rainfall will reduce by 20 to 40 percent in southern Australia?

Open Thread

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“So long as the tools a paradigm supplies continue to prove capable of solving the problems it defines, science moves fastest and penetrates most deeply through confident employment of the tools. The reason is clear. As in manufacture so in science – retooling is an extravagance to be reserved for the occasion that demands it. The significance of crises is the indication they provide that an occasion for the retooling has arrived.” Thomas Kuhn

Open Thread

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Low tide, not global cooling.

[Photograph taken at Lammermoor Beach, Capricorn coast, recently]Lammermoor Low Tide

Open Thread

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“There is no environmental reason for people to go hungry now or in the future. There is no need to use any more land to sustain humanity… Creek north of Byfield
The only limit to creating a planet that future generations will be proud of are our imaginations and our social systems.”
Erle C. Ellis writing in the New York Times

Open Thread

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We must abandon completely the naive faith that school automatically liberates the mind and serves the cause of human progress; in fact, we know that it may serve any cause. [It] may serve tyranny as well as truth, war as well as peace, death as well as life . . . whether it is good or evil depends, not on the laws of learning, but on the conception of life and civilization that gives it substance and direction. In the course of history, education has served every purpose and doctrine contrived by man. If it is to serve the cause of human freedom, it must be explicitly designed for that purpose.
— George S. Counts