HR: 13:40h
AN: ED23C-01 INVITED    [Abstracts]
TI: The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change: A Science Communication Challenge
AU: * Somerville, R C
EM: rsomerville@ucsd.edu
AF: Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California, San Diego 9500 Gilman Drive, #0224, La Jolla, CA 92093-0224, United States
AB: The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), established in 1988, issued its Fourth Assessment Report in 2007. The IPCC has been influential in the debate over anthropogenic climate change. It has become the de facto voice of the mainstream scientific community, as the world seeks to understand the findings of climate science and their relevance to public policy. The primary purpose of the IPCC is to provide an authoritative assessment of results from climate science as an input to policymakers. Its mandate is to assess research, not to do research. Its reports are policy-relevant but not policy-prescriptive. The IPCC assessment reports are rightly regarded as the gold standard in climate science. They are well-suited for use as references for experts and textbooks for graduate students. However, as a source of information for the public, students and educators, the IPCC reports are far from optimal. They are written almost entirely by scientists. They tend to be long, detailed, technical, and full of jargon. In addition, the reports appear at intervals of about 5 years. Thus, the IPCC is not nimble and cannot respond quickly to new scientific developments. The IPCC is also not especially adept at communication, so its reports can be difficult to read and mysterious to non-specialists. As a result, the IPCC reports often need translation into plain language and interpretation for a wide variety of potential users. This presentation, by an IPCC Coordinating Lead Author, surveys a variety of recent and planned efforts to mine the IPCC reports as a rich source of scientific knowledge that should be made more accessible to the wider world.
UR: http://www.ipcc.ch
DE: 0805 Elementary and secondary education
DE: 0810 Post-secondary education
DE: 0815 Informal education
DE: 1622 Earth system modeling (1225)
DE: 1630 Impacts of global change (1225)
SC: Education and Human Resources [ED]
MN: 2007 Fall Meeting