Oeschger Centre for Climate Change Research (OCCR)

Thomas Stocker raises questions on the format of future IPCC Assessment Reports

6 January 2013

Thomas Stocker, member of the Oeschger Centre and Co-chair of Working Group I of the IPCC is one of nine Earth and planetary scientists who were asked by Nature Geoscience to contribute to a special issue to mark its 5th anniversary. The now well-established journal was launched in 2007. "This timescale, just enough to complete a research project or two, may not seem a long time", the editors write in the current issue of their magazine, "but a lot has happened in the collective of disciplines that are covered in our journal."

Nature Geoscience has asked the authors of these nine anniversary pieces to look back at fields where scientific understanding, or the public's perception of the science, is now substantially different than it was in 2007. In his article entitled "Adapting the assessments" Thomas Stocker advocates that it is now time to consider how best to provide increasingly complex climate information to policymakers as the current assessment of climate change by the IPCC is nearing completion.

In an outlook Thomas Stocker reasons that the knowledge gain per time tends to decline in a mature scientific field. "Hence the questions must be raised whether the IPCC's 5- to 7-year assessment cycles can still be maintained with a reasonable effort, whether the volunteer scientists who act as lead authors are equipped with an adequate infrastructure for this Herculean task, and whether enough researchers will continue to donate their time."

There might be alternative approaches to achieve the same goal of disseminating the best and most robust understanding of the scientific basis of risk of human-induced climate change. One possibility, Thomas Stocker recommends, is a "carefully selected series of assessments that are narrower in scope and each deal with a specific, policy-relevant issue."