– The UN started these IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) reports in 1988 and they come out approximately every five years. This is the IPCC’s Fourth Assesment Report. Previous reports came out as follows:
IPCC First Assesment Report 1990
IPCC Second Assesment Report 1995
IPCC Third Assesment Report 2001
– Within each report, there are multiple working groups, each with a different focus and they each release their own sub-reports at various times during the reporting year.
– What we’re looking at here in this post is the IPCC Fourth Assesment Report, Working Group III.
– In the Fourth IPCC Assesment Report the working group’s specific focuses were as follows:
Working Group I – Physical Science Basis of Climate Change
Working Group II – Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability
Working Group III – Mitigation
– Working Group III’s Mitigation sub-report is where we are now in the sequence.
– For a complete breakdown/overview on the IPCC Reports, go here: ➡
– This stuff is the subject of huge debates among nations, between scientists, within the Blogosphere and anywhere else where people have formed opinions or have vested interests in the implications. Therefore I’m not going to try to report on it. Rather, I’m just going to collect reports and POVs and enumerate them below as I find them.
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➡ – Wikipedia overview of the IPCC Reports up to and including the fourth one.
➡ – The actual IPCC Fourth Assessment Report, Working Group III document (PDF)
➡ – Report from the Sietch Blog (only 8 years and counting left)
➡ – From Scientific American (what will it cost to fix it?)
➡ – From the Climate Progress Blog (countries are avoiding responsibility)
➡ – From the Climate Progress Blog (US & China resisting global efforts)
➡ – From the Climate Progress Blog (Highlights of the IPCC’s Mitigation Report)
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– One thing I noticed is that there do not seem to be as many articles and commentaries on this sub report as on the last. One wonders if the subject material (mitigation) is just inherently less interesting or if people are just getting bored with the entire business.
– The more I think about these things, the more I keep circling back around to the idea that since humans are the cause of the world’s environmental problems, the need to develop a deep and consilient understanding of human nature is probably one of the most effective and obvious approaches we can make to solving our problems. In this context, Evolutionary Psychology seems to me to hold a particular promise.