IPCC by the Numbers
Molly Samuel
KQED
06/30/2010
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has announced the contributors for its next Assessment Report. All 831 of them. Of those authors, proportionally more are women, more are from developing nations, and a pretty good number are from California.
The Fifth Assessment Report by the numbers:
* 1990 was the year the first IPCC Assessment Report was published. Since then, they've come out every five to seven years.
* The report is divided into three Working Groups. Working Group I sums up the physical science, WGII is on impacts and adaptation, and WGIII gets into mitigation strategies.
* 831 scientists are contributing to the report. They were selected out of about 3,000 applicants.
* 30% of those scientists are from developing countries; 25% are women; and for 60%, this is their first time contributing to an IPCC report.
* 39 of those scientists are based in California at universities, NGOs, and government agencies. That's out of 169 American contributors.
And an introduction to some of those Californians:
Stanford biology and environmental science professor Chris Field heads up Working Group II, as he did on the previous Assessment Report. In an email he said in this 5th edition, "there will be new chapters on parts of the world that were not considered before (especially the oceans) and on key processes (e.g. human security)."
Rebecca Shaw, the Nature Conservancy's associate director of conservation and climate change programs in California, is a first-time contributor to the IPCC. She's also on the Governor’s Task Force for Climate Change, and is leading a vulnerability assessment on the Golden State.
Peter Brewer is the Senior Scientist at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) where he researches ocean chemistry. No stranger to the ocean, Brewer has gone on numerous deep sea expeditions and taken part in over 90 remotely operated dives for MBARI research. Brewer’s expertise was featured in previous IPPC reports where he was a lead author on carbon capture and storage. He will be the lead author on an open oceans chapter in this report.
