For the first time, the method we have developed provides a comprehensive overview of many different viewpoints on what could be considered a “fair” contribution for each of over 30 countries, and for the periods 2020, 2025, 2030 and 2050. It is based on a very wide range of literature from researchers from the north and south that was initially collected for the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report (A...

The United Nations, Food and Agricultural Organization [FAO, Steinfeld, Gerber, Wassenaar, Castel, Rosales, and de Haan (2006). Livestock’s Long Shadow. Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations] report titled Livestock’s Long Shadow (LLS) stated that 18% (approximately 7100 Tg CO2eq yr ) of anthropogenic greenhouse gases (GHGs) are directly and indirectly related to the world’s l...

How and why did the scientific consensus about sea level rise due to the disintegration of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS), expressed in the third Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) assessment, disintegrate on the road to the fourth? Using ethnographic interviews and analysis of IPCC documents, we trace the abrupt disintegration of the WAIS consensus. First, we provide a brief...

Projections of future climate change depend upon future anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. In preparation for its Fifth Assessment Report, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change implemented a new approach to generating emissions scenarios, called ‘Representative Concentration Pathways’ (RCPs), which replace the scenarios in the ‘Special Report on Emissions Scenarios’ (SRES). The RCP...

The climate is a key ingredient in the earth’s complex system that sustains human life and well-being. There is a growing consensus that emissions of greenhouse gases due to human activity will alter the earth’s climate, most notably by causing temperatures, precipitation levels, and weather variability to increase (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 2007). The development of rati...

Treatment of error and uncertainty is an essential component of science and is crucial in policy-relevant disciplines, such as climate science. We posit here that awareness of both “false positive” and “false negative” errors is particularly critical in climate science and assessments, such as those of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Scientific and assessment practices likely foc...

This paper provides a brief overview of certain issues related to climate modeling and the role that dendrochronology can play, and has already played, in this context. Modeling is an essential approach to investigating the future evolution of the climate system in response to human activities. Tree-ring chronologies, on the other hand, have the capability of providing key parameters for model ...

We consider estimation of quantile curves for a general class of nonstationary processes. Consistency and central limit results are obtained for local linear quantile estimates under a mild short-range dependence condition. Our results are applied to environmental data sets. In particular, our results can be used to address the problem of whether climate variability has changed, an important pr...

Since the late 1980s, scientists and policy makers have devoted considerable attention and resources to the issue of global climate change. Domestic and international policies in response focus primarily on prevention of future climate impacts on society through the mitigation of carbon dioxide emissions. Academic and political attention is also largely focused on issues of mitigation. Adaptati...