New IPCC report to focus on Asian monsoon issues

LONDON - A new report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) known as AR5, will focus on factors that materially affect people’s lives, such as the Asian monsoon.

The report will also look at aspects of climate change that might be irreversible, reports the BBC.

The recent review of the IPCC’s procedures, conducted by the InterAcademy Council (IAC) said that some assertions about the likelihood of severe impacts were based on little research.

“The new approach is that we first assess our physical understanding of these fundamental processes: what are the elements that change them, how do they respond to a background change in albedo or temperature or shift in rain bands?” said Thomas Stocker from the University of Bern in Switzerland, co-chair of the climate science working group for AR5.

“Once we’ve assessed that, we then ask how does this knowledge inform us for projecting the monsoon in India, for example, or Southeast Asia? What does it tell about El Nino projections? And so forth,” he added.

Active areas of research that are vital for understanding climate change - including the interactions of clouds and dust particles in the atmosphere, and sea-level rise - will be detailed in their respective chapters.

For an improved analysis, the IPCC is adopting a new set of “scenarios” - projections of how the future may unfold, in terms of economic growth, the size of the world’s population, policy choices on energy, and so on, all of which affect emissions.

“Since the release of AR4, there’s been a vast amount of literature on socio-economic aspects of climate change,” said IPCC vice-chairman Hoesung Lee.

“And the fifth assessment report will particularly look into this growing literature.” (ANI)