U.N. Panel on Climate Change Reports

We will spend a couple of classes looking at the international law on the environment towards the end of the course. But it is useful to note now that last week the Working Group 1 of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released its most recent report on climate change. An account of it can be found in The New York Times, and an executive summary of the report for policy makers can be found here. The Report, which is considered by the scientific community to be be quite conservative in approach, concluded that there is a 95% confidence that the earth is warming and it is due to human activity. Moreover, it identified an upper limit for carbon dioxide emissions, beyond which the planet will face irreversible climate change. At current emissions we are likely to exceed the limit by 2040. This will likely provide some impetus for treaty negotiations, which have been bogged down over the last decade.