Climate Progress interviews Christopher Field and Michael MacCracken on climate change reality

The global recession will provide a short respite from climate challenges, shrinking greenhouse gas emissions from industry, offices, homes and vehicles this year. When the economy resumes growing, so will the planet's carbon footprint, unless business-as-usual practices change.

U.S. greenhouse gas emissions totaled 7.3 billion metric tons in carbon dioxide equivalents in 2007, the Energy Department's Energy Information Administration reported last year. Using EIA's most recent forecast for CO2 emissions from major fuels, U.S. emissions could drop to 6.98 billion tons this year. Even if a recovery begins in 2010, as Federal Reserve governors predict, emissions next year could total 7.15 billion tons, less than in 2007. The carbon reduction would be greater, to be sure, if the more pessimistic economic forecasts prove true.

The United States has lost 3.6 million payroll jobs since the recession began in December 2007, and no major part of the economy has escaped. The gross domestic product fell 6% between the third and fourth quarters of last year, and industrial production in January was down 10% from January the year before. Manufacturing declined by 13%, and the empty factories, idled power plants, cold furnaces and fewer worker commutes are giving the atmosphere a brief break.

The recession's accelerating toll on factories and utilities led the research firm Point Carbon to lower its latest projection of European C02 emissions for 2008-2012 by 4.4% from December's forecast. Japan and Australia have also reported cuts in power generation.

More time to perfect a new global treaty?

Harvard University economist Robert Stavins said the impact of the worldwide recession is "extremely unfortunate," but added, "I think there is a silver lining." Because the downturn approximates efforts by European nations to trim their emissions by about 2% a year, it will give policymakers and diplomats more time to perfect a treaty that is an improvement on the Kyoto Protocol. The current timetable calls for the treaty to be renegotiated in December in Copenhagen.

"What this says to me is that with regard to Copenhagen, it would be fully appropriate for nations of the world to sit back and take a deep breath." While he remains "bullish" on the prospects of a new treaty, Stavins said he thinks the lull in economic activity and accompanying drop in emissions mean that the negotiations should be less driven by "handwringing" over whether nations will meet a deadline imposed by accumulating greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

Negotiators and the Obama administration, he said, can now take more time to perfect a treaty that works, so that they "don't make the mistakes of Kyoto, of countries signing a treaty whose targets they can't meet or that they can't ratify. So here's the opportunity that this terrible tragedy [the economic crash] presents."

Carbon intensity must shrink faster than the economy grows

The amount of greenhouse gases produced in this country for every dollar of economic growth -- called carbon intensity -- has been trending downward slightly. In 2007, each million dollars of GDP produced 632 million tons of CO2 equivalent, in constant dollars based on 2000 prices.

Changes in the makeup of the economy play a part in the trend. "We make different things than we used to," said Chris Fields, global ecology director at the Carnegie Institution for Science and a member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. "It's [more] health care versus [less] aluminum. And the way we generate power has gotten more efficient."

But improvement must accelerate tenfold over the next four decades if levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere are to be stabilized by 2050, notes a study by the McKinsey Global Institute.

"If we're going to shrink emissions and grow the economy, somehow we have to shrink carbon intensity faster than we grow," Fields said.

Pieter Tans, a senior scientist at the U.S. Earth System Research Laboratory in Boulder, Colo., said the carbon reduction gains from even a severe recession won't make a lasting difference in the concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere.

"Suppose the economy really slows down. How much will emissions decrease? Let's say 6% over a year," Tans said. "If you put that amount less carbon in atmosphere ... the reduction is just one-quarter of 1 part CO2 per million parts atmosphere."

"That's less than the year-to-year variability in measurements of atmospheric CO2," he added. "There is no sign of a slowdown in 2008" in CO2 concentrations.

Copyright 2009 E&E Publishing. All Rights Reserved.

Antarctica is heating up fast, a Kansas researcher and other scientists warn

by Scott Canon, Tricity Herald, March 8, 2009

From Democracy Now!, February 26, 2009

Member of UN Environment Panel Warns Greenhouse Emissions Rising at Alarming, Unexpected Rate

We speak to Chris Field, a leading member of the Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, about his warning that the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere is rising more rapidly than expected in recent years. Field says the current trajectory of climate change is now much worse than the IPCC had originally projected. On Wednesday, Field told a Senate panel droughts caused by global warming could make parts of the American Southwest dangerous to live in.

Christopher Field, founding director of the Carnegie Institution’s Department of Global Ecology and professor of biology and environmental earth system science at Stanford University.

JUAN GONZALEZ: A leading member of the Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is warning the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere is rising more rapidly than expected in recent years. The scientist, Chris Field, says the current trajectory of climate change is now much worse than the IPCC had originally projected in part due to China and India’s increasing reliance on coal power.

The research shows carbon emissions have grown sharply since 2000, despite growing concerns about global warming. During the 1990s, carbon emissions grew by less than one percent per year. Since 2000, emissions have grown at a rate of 3.5% per year. No part of the world had a decline in emissions from 2000 to 2008.

Earlier this month, Field told the American Association for the Advancement of Science, “We are basically looking now at a future climate beyond anything we’ve considered seriously in climate model situations.”

AMY GOODMAN: On Wednesday, Chris Field testified before a Senate panel and warned droughts caused by global warming could make parts of the American Southwest dangerous to live in.

Professor Field joins us now from Stanford University, the founding director of the Carnegie Institution’s Department of Global Ecology and a professor of biology and environmental earth system science at Stanford University. He’s also co-chair, just been named, of Working Group 2 of the Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

We welcome you to Democracy Now!, Dr. Field.

CHRISTOPHER FIELD: Thank you very much.

AMY GOODMAN: Why don’t you review what you told the Senate yesterday? It was a pretty heated hearing.

CHRISTOPHER FIELD: It was. And I think it’s important for people to know that the IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, provides a definitive assessment of where we are with climate, but that science continues to evolve. And in particular, we’ve seen rapid increase in knowledge in two important areas: areas that I call forcing, how hard we’re pushing on the climate system, and feedbacks, what we expect the earth system to do in response to this harder forcing. In particular, we’ve seen CO2 emissions grow very rapidly, as you’ve already described.

The idea is that we’ve used climate models to explore possible futures. We characterize economic growth rates, population, kinds of ways that energy is generated, and use those to say, well, what might CO2 emissions be going into the future? And that’s what the climate models run.

If we look since 2000, we’ve seen a rapid acceleration in CO2 emissions, so that the actual trajectory of emissions has grown more rapidly than in any of the scenarios that were characterized in detail. The reason I say we’re on a trajectory of climate change that we haven’t explored is that we have only looked at scenarios where the growth of CO2 was limited to in the range of 2.0-2.5% per year. We genuinely don’t know what a climate will look like with the more rapid rate of increase that we’re actually seeing.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And as we mentioned in the lead-in, you see that the increasing emissions from China and India have been part of the reason why the modeling so far has not been as accurate as expected?

CHRISTOPHER FIELD: Well, it’s not exactly right to say “the modeling so far.” You know, we characterized possible futures based on expectations of the way the world might unfold, and these weren’t intended as predictions; they were just supposed to characterize possibilities.

But what we have seen is that the time since 2000 was a period of rapid economic growth, and it was also a period of time where a large fraction of the economic growth was fueled by electricity based on coal, and coal is the energy source that releases the most CO2 per unit of useful energy that’s released. The consequence of that is that we have seen a very rapid increase in CO2 emissions.

AMY GOODMAN: Christopher Field, can you lay out the scenario that you laid out before the Senate? What exactly do you see happening at the end of the century, if we go on the trajectory we’re on now?

CHRISTOPHER FIELD: Well, the important thing to remember is that we’re not committed to any particular trajectory and that there are a range of different possibilities. The possibility that is increasingly stark and that we really want to be increasingly certain to avoid is one where we end up with climate forcing at the high end of the possible scenarios. The IPCC projected that with the scenarios it explored, we could see 2100 temperatures that were anywhere from as little as 2 °F to as much as 11-12 °F warmer than possible.

And what we increasingly see is that with temperatures at the upper end of this warming range, we begin to get a large series of very dangerous feedbacks from the earth’s system. In particular, we see tropical forest transitioning from taking up large amounts of carbon to taking up very little or even releasing carbon. And it looks like there’s an increasing risk that high latitude ecosystems that are characterized by these frozen soils called permafrost may release some of the organic matter that’s stored in this permafrost to the atmosphere. So you end up in a situation where, instead of having ecosystems storing large amounts of carbon, they're storing very little or releasing large amounts.

The calculations to date are that tropical forests—and this is something that is explored in the IPCC—could, at the higher ranges of temperature forcing, release anywhere from a hundred billion to 500 billion extra tons of carbon to the atmosphere by 2100. And that should be put in the context of understanding that during the entire period from the beginning of the Industrial Revolution until now, all of the world societies have only released a little over 300 billion tons of carbon to the atmosphere.

AMY GOODMAN: What could happen in the Southwest?

CHRISTOPHER FIELD: Well, if you look at the projections from the IPCC, North America is characterized by a variety of different patterns of precipitation, with increasing precipitation at high latitudes and a sharp decrease in precipitation across the American Southwest. We basically see a big tongue of area that extends from California to about Oklahoma, where the combination of decreased precipitation and increased temperature, increased evaporation, leads to decreased river runoff. And that decrease is quite large, in the range of 25 to even 35 percent. It really projects a period of extreme stress on water resources, limited availability of water for all of the kinds of water users that are out there, from agriculture to industry to cities to instream ecological uses.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, one of the centerpieces of the Obama administration’s efforts to respond to climate change is, obviously, the whole development now of carbon emission permits and capping and trading of these permits. As a scientist, what would be your concerns about a solution that centers so much around this kind of a market approach, in terms of how effective it might be in dealing with the future?

CHRISTOPHER FIELD: Well, if I look at the problem, the thing that really strikes me is that we don’t have very long to get an effective climate regime in place. The risk with these ecosystem feedbacks is that once we get past a certain point in warming, the problem gets more difficult every year, because we’re ending up with, you know, essentially less and less help from the oceans and the land. And from my perspective, the really critical thing is that we get a handle on the emissions growth so that we can slow it rapidly and turn the corner, so that we’re looking at a period of decreased emissions moving into the future.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to ask not only about what’s happening in the Southwest, but a vicious cycle you talked about that could do everything from ignite tropical forests to melt the Arctic tundra.

CHRISTOPHER FIELD: The idea of these vicious cycle feedbacks is that once warming reaches a certain point, the amount of assistance that we’re getting in terms of carbon storage from the land and oceans tends to go down. And this is quite clear from the IPCC models, and it’s clear from a number of other more recent lines of work. In the IPCC, the models characterize a future in which tropical forests at the high range of warming have a potential to release large amounts of carbon to the atmosphere.

One of the new numbers that’s a great concern to me is that we’ve been doing studies of how much organic matter is stored in these frozen soils in northern latitudes, permafrost soils, and the new numbers are that approximately a billion tons of carbon is stored in the organic matter in these high latitude soils. Climate model projections indicate that at high amounts of warming large fractions of the permafrost could melt, and some of the projections have that at from 60 to 90 percent of the permafrost melting.

And the surprising thing about these permafrost soils is that the organic matter that’s contained within them is not this incredibly stabilized, difficult-to-decompose stuff; it’s basically frozen plants that have been sitting there for, in some cases, tens of thousands of years. And when the permafrost is thawed, these plants decompose quite quickly, releasing their carbon as CO2 to the atmosphere or as methane to the atmosphere, which is a greenhouse gas that, on a molecule per molecule basis, is about 25 times as powerful as CO2.

The basic risk is that if we reach a certain point in the warming, what we’ll end up with is a vicious cycle, where the warming causes additional permafrost melt, which causes additional CO2 to be released to the atmosphere, which causes additional warming, which creates this vicious cycle.

We don’t have evidence that it’s a clear tipping point, or we don’t know where there might be a tipping point out there. And one of the things that I’m advocating is that we both advance the science quickly enough to figure out if indeed there is a threshold beyond which this can’t be stopped, but also to take action as a society to ensure that we’re very conservative with respect to how far along this pathway we go.

AMY GOODMAN: Christopher Field, we want to ask you to stay with us. We’re going to break. When we come back, want to play for you the comment of one of the climate change deniers. A professor from Princeton University was invited also to testify. Then we’re going to be looking at the power of the lobbyists around climate change, and a massive conference is taking place this weekend of grassroots youth activists in Washington called Power Shift. We’ll speak with them and find out about what’s considered to be one of the largest civil disobedience in US history is going to take place on Monday outside a coal plant outside Washington, D.C. Stay with us.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: On Wednesday, our guest, Chris Field, testified before the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works. The Republican minority invited Princeton University physicist William Happer to testify at the same hearing. He’s a former Energy Department official and chair of the board of directors of the George Marshall Institute, an organization that’s reportedly received $715,000 from ExxonMobil since 1998. This is a part of what Professor Happer had to say.

WILLIAM HAPPER: The increasing concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere will cause some warming of the earth’s surface. The key question is, will the net effect of the warming and any other effects of CO2 be good or bad for humanity? I believe the increase of CO2 will be good.


I predict that future historians will look back on this period much as we now look back on the period just before we passed the 18th Amendment to the US Constitution to prohibit the manufacturing, sale or transportation of intoxicating liquors. At the time, the 18th Amendment seemed to be exactly the right thing to do. It was a 1917 version of saving the planet from the ravages of climate change. More than half the states enacted prohibition laws before the 18th Amendment was finally ratified. Only one state, Rhode Island, voted against it, and my hat’s off to the senator from Rhode Island. I’m sorry he’s not here.


Well, there were many people who thought that Prohibition might do more harm than good, but they were completely outmatched by the temperance movement, whose motives and methods had much in common with the movement to stop climate change. Deeply sincere people thought they were saving humanity from the evils of alcohol, just as many people now sincerely think they’re saving humanity from the evils of CO2. Prohibition was a mistake, and our country’s probably still not fully recovered from the damage it did. For example, institutions like organized crime got their start in that era. Drastic limitations on CO2 are likely to damage our country in an analogous way. There’s tremendous opportunity for corruption there.

CHRISTOPHER FIELD: Well, there’s been a tremendous amount of science to assess the likely impacts of rising CO2 on climate, and the IPCC overwhelmingly concludes that the overall impact is likely to be sharply negative. I think that as we look at new science, we see increasing validation of the conclusions of the IPCC, in terms of the mechanisms of climate change and in terms of the impacts of climate change.

You know, the assessment of whether the issue of Prohibition is relevant to climate, I think, is really a red herring. There’s essentially never been an activity that’s—where the scientific community has been as coordinated and as careful in its assessment as it’s been with climate change. And to say that, well, sometimes the science is wrong just really doesn’t reflect the amount, not only of careful thinking and coordination, but also the amount of testing of all the ideas that’s gone into the modern scientific assessment of climate change. You know, essentially every component of our understanding has been scrutinized and tested and evaluated from different directions. And although there’s still a lot we don’t understand completely, some of which I have already talked about this morning, the overall analysis of where we’re headed and what the mechanisms are is just deeply well established.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, we want to thank you for being with us, Chris Field, a professor of biology and environmental earth science at Stanford University.

AMY GOODMAN: And we also wanted to ask if you might stay with us as we’re joined by a guest in Washington, because we want to get your comment on the politics of and the money behind those who are lobbying against the whole issue of climate change.

Link to U.S. Senate Committee hearing page: http://epw.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=Hearings.Hearing&Hearing_ID=864d3319-802a-23ad-46a0-15d3b819178d

Link to above text: http://www.democracynow.org/2009/2/26/member_of_un_environment_panel_warns

UPDATE: For readers searching for Dr. Field's very important remarks, see this post for an interview that took place on the 26th and also a link to a video of his testimony before the Senate Committee on the Environment & Public Works from Feb. 25th (the link below goes to the transcript of the interview):

http://climatechangepsychology.blogspot.com/2009/02/chris-field-testifies-before-us-senate.html

Decisive Action Needed as Warming Predictions Worsen, Says Carnegie Scientist

UPDATE of Feb. 28: For readers searching for Dr. Field's very important remarks, see this post for an interview that took place on the 26th and also a link to a video of his testimony before the Senate Committee on the Environment & Public Works from Feb. 25th (the link below goes to the transcript of the interview) -- hit page down several times to get to the post:

http://climatechangepsychology.blogspot.com/2009/02/chris-field-testifies-before-us-senate.html

[BLOGGER'S NOTE: OK, this is starting to bug me -- I will see what I can do about finding a transcript of Dr. Field's remarks and posting it. I can't find anything on the net, as yet, that gives a good picture of what he had to say. In fact, you might want to look instead at an earlier post which has more detail than this one -- click here and hit page-down twice.]

"Climate Change Worst-Case Scenarios: Not Worst Enough"

by Dan Ferber, Findings (the Science Magazine news blog), February 14, 2009

The news on climate change seemed bad enough in 2007, when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) announced in their fourth assessment report that "warming of the climate system is unequivocal," that humans were "very likely" to blame, and that if we keep pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, climate will "very likely" change much more than it did in the 20th century. But researchers reported today that, in the two years since the report was released, the news has gotten even worse.

Climate scientist Chris Field of Stanford University relayed the first bit of bad news to a sober audience during his talk, "What is New and Surprising since the IPCC Fourth Assessment." According to a paper his group published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2007, humans are now pumping out climate-warming gases nearly three times faster than the IPCC authors anticipated in their worst-case scenario. Specifically, Field described how carbon emissions had been increasing at 0.9% per year through the 1990s, but accelerated to 3.5% per year growth between 2000 and 2007.

Why the disparity?

And the video below is from the Telegraph of all places:

UPDATE of Feb. 28: For readers searching for Dr. Field's very important remarks, see this post for an interview that took place on the 26th and also a link to a video of his testimony before the Senate Committee on the Environment & Public Works from Feb. 25th (the link below goes to the transcript of the interview) -- hit page down several times to get to the post:

http://climatechangepsychology.blogspot.com/2009/02/chris-field-testifies-before-us-senate.html

UPDATE of Feb. 28: For readers searching for Dr. Field's very important remarks, see this post for an interview that took place on the 26th and also a link to a video of his testimony before the Senate Committee on the Environment & Public Works from Feb. 25th (the link below goes to the transcript of the interview) -- hit page down several times to get to the post:

http://climatechangepsychology.blogspot.com/2009/02/chris-field-testifies-before-us-senate.html

OK, this is the "Duh! Who knew?" moment.

Update: sorry to be so snarky, folks, but really... we knew this, and let's hope the powers that be will finally do the right thing.

Climate Change Likely To Be More Devastating Than Experts Predicted, Warns Top IPCC Scientist

ScienceDaily (Feb. 15, 2009) — Without decisive action, global warming in the 21st century is likely to accelerate at a much faster pace and cause more environmental damage than predicted, according to a leading member of the Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

IPCC scientist Chris Field of Stanford University and the Carnegie Institution for Science points to recent studies showing that, in a business-as-usual world, higher temperatures could ignite tropical forests and melt the Arctic tundra, releasing billions of tons of greenhouse gas that could raise global temperatures even more—a vicious cycle that could spiral out of control by the end of the century.

"There is a real risk that human-caused climate change will accelerate the release of carbon dioxide from forest and tundra ecosystems, which have been storing a lot of carbon for thousands of years," said Field, a professor of biology and of environmental Earth system science at Stanford, and a senior fellow at Stanford's Woods Institute for the Environment. "We don't want to cross a critical threshold where this massive release of carbon starts to run on autopilot."

Field will present his findings Feb. 14, at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in Chicago during a symposium titled, "What Is New and Surprising Since the IPCC Fourth Assessment?"

Nobel Prize

Established by the United Nations in 1988, the IPCC brings together hundreds of experts from around the world to assess the science and policy implications of climate change. In 2007, the IPCC and Al Gore were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Field was among 25 IPCC scientists who attended the award ceremony in Oslo, Norway.

Since 1990, the IPCC has published four comprehensive assessment reports on human-induced climate change. Field was a coordinating lead author of the fourth assessment, Climate Change 2007, which concluded that the Earth's temperature is likely to increase 2-11.5 °F (1.1-6.4 °C) by 2100, depending on how many tons of greenhouse gases are released into the atmosphere in coming decades.

But recent climate studies suggest that the fourth assessment report underestimated the potential severity of global warming over the next 100 years. "We now have data showing that from 2000 to 2007, greenhouse gas emissions increased far more rapidly than we expected, primarily because developing countries, like China and India, saw a huge upsurge in electric power generation, almost all of it based on coal," Field said.

This trend is likely to continue, he added, if more developing countries turn to coal and other carbon-intensive fuels to meet their energy needs. "If we're going to continue re-carbonizing the energy system, we're going to have big CO₂ emissions in the future," he said. "As a result, the impacts of climate change will probably be more serious and diverse than those described in the fourth assessment."

IPCC assessment reports are organized into three working groups. In September 2008, Field was elected co-chair of Working Group 2, which is charged with assessing the impacts of climate change on social, economic and natural systems. One of his major responsibilities is to oversee the writing and editing of the "Working Group 2 Report" for the IPCC fifth assessment, which will be published in 2014.

"In the fourth assessment, we looked at a very conservative range of climate outcomes," Field said. "The fifth assessment should include futures with a lot more warming."

Forest-carbon feedback

Of particular concern is the impact of global warming on the tropics. "Tropical forests are essentially inflammable," Field said. "You couldn't get a fire to burn there if you tried. But if they dry out just a little bit, the result can be very large and destructive wildfires."

According to several recent climate models, loss of tropical forests to wildfires, deforestation and other causes could increase atmospheric CO₂ concentrations from 10 to 100 parts per million (ppm) by the end of the century. This would be a significant increase, given that the total concentration of CO₂ in the atmosphere is currently about 380 ppm, the highest in 650,000 years.

"It is increasingly clear that as you produce a warmer world, lots of forested areas that had been acting as carbon sinks could be converted to carbon sources," Field said. "Essentially we could see a forest-carbon feedback that acts like a foot on the accelerator pedal for atmospheric CO₂. We don't exactly know how strong the feedback could be, but it's pretty clear that the warmer it gets, the more likely it is that degradation of tropical forests will increase the atmospheric CO₂."

The ocean is another vital reservoir for carbon storage. Recent studies show that global warming has altered wind patterns in the Southern Ocean, which in turn has reduced the ocean's capacity to soak up excess atmospheric CO₂. "As the Earth warms, it generates faster winds over the oceans surrounding Antarctica," Field explained. "These winds essentially blow the surface water out of the way, allowing water with higher concentrations of CO₂ to rise to the surface. This higher-CO₂ water is closer to CO₂-saturated, so it takes up less carbon dioxide from the atmosphere."

Tundra thawing

Climate scientists also worry that permafrost in the Arctic tundra will thaw, releasing enormous amounts of CO₂ and methane gas into the atmosphere. According to Field, the most critical, short-term concern is the release of CO₂ from decaying organic matter that has been frozen for millennia. "The new estimate of the total amount of carbon that's frozen in permafrost soils is on the order of 1,000 billion tons," he said. "By comparison, the total amount of CO₂ that's been released in fossil fuel combustion since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution is around 350 billion tons. So the amount of carbon that's stored in these frozen soils is truly vast."

Much of the carbon is locked up in frozen plants that were buried under very cold conditions and have remained in deep freeze for 25,000-50,000 years, he added. "We know that the Arctic is warming faster than anyplace else," he said. "And there is clear evidence that these frozen plants are very susceptible to decomposition when the tundra thaws. So melting of permafrost is poised to be an even stronger foot on the accelerator pedal of atmospheric CO_2, with every increment of warming causing an increment of permafrost-melting that shoots an increment of CO₂ into the atmosphere, which in turn increases warming.

"There's a vicious-cycle component to both the tundra-thawing and the tropical forest feedbacks, but the IPCC fourth assessment didn't consider either of them in detail. That's basically because they weren't well understood at the time."

For the fifth assessment report, Field said that he and his IPCC colleagues will have access to new research that will allow them to do a better job of assessing the full range of possible climate outcomes. "What have we learned since the fourth assessment? We now know that, without effective action, climate change is going to be larger and more difficult to deal with than we thought. If you look at the set of things that we can do as a society, taking aggressive action on climate seems like one that has the best possibility of a win-win. It can stimulate the economy, allow us to address critical environmental problems, and insure that we leave a sustainable world for our children and grandchildren. Somehow we have to find a way to kick the process into high gear. We really have very little time."