I've booked my trip to Korea for the IPCC Working Group III 5th Assessment Report meeting in Changwon City. I'll also be giving a presentation on 18th July at the Korea Energy Economics Institute. My former student Sung-Kyun Kim started working there earlier this year after getting his PhD from RPI in economics. Work is starting up on the first draft of our chapter, known as the "Zero Order Draft". First task is to read Chapter 3 from the 4th Assessment Report and the guidelines for writing our chapter and connecting our work to the other chapters in the report. We are using some nice tools to coordinate our work which I hadn't used before. One is Dropbox which installs a virtual folder on your computer (on Windows, Mac, or Linux) which is shared across a collaborative team. You can also use it of course, to simply store your own stuff in "the cloud". Another is Doodle which you can use to schedule a meeting. Each of us enter the times we are available to the website. The nice thing is that it automatically gives you the times in your own time zone. This is very useful for a group spanning the time zones from Canberra to California via China, Europe, Africa, and Latin America.
Good luck with your role in Chapter (3) for AR5.
ReplyDeleteI hope you can improve on AR4's Chapter 3. One would for example hope to see the biosphere's uptakes of emissions fully integrated into the sections dealing with emission abatement trajectories. Their absence is it seems largely due to the Chapter's reliance on Wigley's MAGICC model which magically reduces them to zero. They make a belated appearance in 3.3.5.5 Land Use, but are also put there at 0 GtCO2/year in 2000 (Fig.3.28). The section on Forestry and Table 3.6 sees only standing trees as sequestering - in fact regular thinning and harvesting of mature trees increase overall uptakes of CO2 as young trees absorb more and quicker.
The neglect of biospheric CO2 uptakes (or as in Garnaut 2008 assumed to cease altogether pace FAO evidence to the contrary) was systemic throughout AR4. Will AR5 will be better?
AR5 Chapter 5 will have quite a different layout to AR4 Chapter 3 as it now stands though I shouldn't talk about that probably and so won't. It's possible the treatment could be better. I don't have much expertise on that area at all so won't be doing much work on it. I'm not sure who will be responsible for that section of the chapter
ReplyDeleteDavid
ReplyDeleteThat's a bit of a copout. Your name will be attached to the whole chapter, and you must ensure it does reflect your views or resile from it. If you don't have much expertise in that area, you should resign anyway, as the chapter is about Mitigation, and biospheric uptakes are demonstraby more cost effective than emission reductions via use of wind and solar which have zilch positive externalities, unlike hydrocarbon combustion.
All the mitigation options will be covered in the chapter. The breadth of expertise of lead authors varies a lot. Some of the chapter authors like Nebojsa Nakicenovic are pretty expert across the board and others are more focused. Then there will also be "contributing authors" on specific topics where we need help.
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