The intruder of the news gives each evening a spotlight on a personality who could have passed under the radars of the news. Today, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Without pension news, the IPCC report, the largest in eight years, would certainly have made the front page: 10,000 pages on an obviously global issue, which says that the “+1.5C°” will be reached in 2030/ 2035 and that therefore the current trajectory of CO2 emissions is incompatible with the objectives of the Paris Agreement.
>> Global warming: what to remember from the new IPCC report, which warns of the “insufficient” measures taken to date
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is responsible for collecting scientific data, assessing the reality of climate change, its causes and consequences and informing decision-makers. policies.
A group of countries, created in 1988 by the UN
It is not a group of people but a group of countries, created in 1988 by the UN and by the World Meteorological Organization, at the request of the leaders of the G7 alerted by certain scientists who were beginning to say clearly that the activity was responsible for the warming: the summer of 1988 was the hottest in the history of the United States. And it is Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher on the British side who, against all odds, are the most mobilized within the G7. They are not the greenest of the bunch, but they are precisely calling for a hybrid organization that combines politics to prevent UN researchers from being under the influence of environmentalists.
Margaret Thatcher also has a social motivation to counter coal miners’ unions – members of her government later confirmed that this is also why she is pushing to replace coal with nuclear. To be honest, one of his advisers at the foreign office, Crispin Tickell, had written a totally prescient book on global warming 10 years earlier and played a big role in the creation of the IPCC.
195 countries and a tiny budget
Today the IPCC is 195 countries, around thirty employees based in Geneva, Switzerland. A very small budget which varies between five and eight million euros, from voluntary contributions: when the United States came out of it under Trump, France had also increased its share. Researchers are unpaid and are divided into three groups. The report of group 1 is responsible for the findings: it brings together climate physicists, the hard sciences. Group 2 works on the impacts of climate change: these are the human sciences, laboratories that work on agriculture, fishing but also on migrations for example. Group 3, finally, is looking for solutions, with specialists in energy, forestry, sociologists… Today’s report is really the synthesis of everything that has been published since the last one in 2014 .
Important element: there is more and more talk of “losses and damage” which was much talked about at the last COP in Sharm el Sheikh, quite simply because researchers from the countries of the South are more and more numerous: 40% of the members IPCC today.
Its South Korean president is totally unknown
The voice of the IPCC in France is called Valérie Masson Delmotte who is its vice-president, but the president who delivered the report today is a completely unknown South Korean. A real problem, said one of the members of the IPCC off the record: Hoesung Lee is a pure aparatchik in office since 2015 through the game of UN alternation between continents. But it is transparent, disorganized, which greatly complicates communication between the labs. In addition, his mandate expires in July: there is a European candidate, a Belgian climatologist Jean-Pascal van Ypersele, as well as a South African and an American. It should go to Europe unless Africa claims the presidency it never had.
In 2007, the IPCC won the Nobel Prize, but it is also regularly questioned. Even if we hear them less, the climatosceptics have indeed not disappeared. The IPCC is regularly suspected of being financed by lobbies: its financing seems however quite clear. In 2009, just before the COP in Copenhagen, a leak of emails from a large English laboratory was presented as proof of the exaggeration of the role of man in global warming. An independent investigation had ended up denying everything.