{"id":1140,"date":"2015-11-29T00:00:22","date_gmt":"2015-11-29T00:00:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/iccinet.org\/?p=1140"},"modified":"2015-11-29T00:00:22","modified_gmt":"2015-11-29T00:00:22","slug":"november-2015","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/iccinet.org\/zh\/november-2015\/","title":{"rendered":"November 2015"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cThese people know nothing!\u00a0 Nothing!<\/em>\u201d<\/p>\n

This outburst from an eminent Antarctic researcher was as unexpected for me as it was emphatic.\u00a0 It came just outside a seminar during one of the climate negotiating sessions before Copenhagen, where I thought the negotiators present (many former colleagues, known from my own years in diplomacy) had asked intelligent and knowledgeable questions about the current state of the cryosphere \u2013 snow and ice regions, from the poles to high mountains.<\/p>\n

But this researcher was unimpressed, and close to alarm at the lack of understanding among those he knew held the future in their hands moving towards the planned 2009 climate agreement.\u00a0 Our ensuing conversation about those gaps was one of two things that, several months later, led me to decide to found ICCI as I stood in the nearly-deserted Bella Center in Copenhagen, watching on a UNFCCC monitor as the talks fell apart after heads of state left.\u00a0 (The other was meeting a scientist from the British Antarctic Survey on an appropriately snowed-in plane while he told me about black carbon sampling on a remote continent where \u201cBC\u201d frankly had no business being, underscoring just how similar were the different cryosphere regions \u2013 but that\u2019s another story.)<\/p>\n

Since then, in addition to its basic cryosphere climate policy work, ICCI also has made it its mission to ensure climate negotiators and stakeholders \u2013 and we are all <\/em>stakeholders in this one — always had access to the latest cryosphere developments and their impact on the Earth\u2019s climate.\u00a0 However, we have watched as the negotiating goals\u00a0 and what science is telling us have increasingly diverged.\u00a0 As the science moved forward, spurred especially by a wave of results from projects started during the 2007-2009 \u201cInternational Polar Year,\u201d we have watched \u201cthe extremes becoming the means.\u201d As one scientist put it:\u00a0 what five years ago was considered an unlikely outlier (say, melt rates on Greenland) has become the average.\u00a0 And that bar has kept moving.<\/p>\n

Scientists also were noticing that gap.\u00a0 After IPCC AR5 especially, with its very key cryosphere messages that seemed to go unheeded, their sense of urgency only increased as it was joined by new research confirming that many of the dynamics they most feared were drawing closer.<\/p>\n

The \u201cThresholds\u201d Report, now released just before COP-21, is the result of a two-year process to ensure that this time, not only climate negotiators but also their \u201cpolitical masters\u201d \u2013 our heads of state \u2013 clearly understand what lies in the balance for Paris. \u00a0Please read it.\u00a0 We can still slow these dynamics, but time is short.\u00a0 As the \u201cThresholds\u201d Preface says, the only thing lacking is political will \u2013 and courage, to see the science head-on.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cThese people know nothing!\u00a0 Nothing!\u201d This outburst from an eminent Antarctic researcher was as unexpected for me as it was emphatic.\u00a0 It came just outside a seminar during one of the climate negotiating sessions before Copenhagen, where I thought the negotiators present (many former colleagues, known from my own years in diplomacy) had asked intelligent […]\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_lmt_disableupdate":"","_lmt_disable":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1140","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ice-blog"],"modified_by":"admin","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/iccinet.org\/zh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1140","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/iccinet.org\/zh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/iccinet.org\/zh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iccinet.org\/zh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iccinet.org\/zh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1140"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/iccinet.org\/zh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1140\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1142,"href":"https:\/\/iccinet.org\/zh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1140\/revisions\/1142"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/iccinet.org\/zh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1140"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iccinet.org\/zh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1140"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iccinet.org\/zh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1140"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}