DEPARTMENT COLLOQUIUM | Climate-Gate and Copenhagen: Science in the Arena of Climate Policy

Speaker: Henry Pollack (UM Geological Sciences)

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), an entity of the United Nations Environmental Programme and the World Meteorological Organization, published its Fourth Assessment Report on climate change in early 2007. Later that year the IPCC shared the Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore. But along with the accolades, the IPCC has long been the target of criticism from a relatively few but very vocal deniers of climate change. This opposition has been voiced largely (but not entirely) outside of the regular scientific venues, principally in the mass media, in state legislatures, the halls of Congress, and in parliaments around the world. This Colloquium will review and evaluate the principal scientific issues, and assess the impact that this opposition has had on the underlying climate science and the parallel development of climate mitigation policy, both within the USA and in the wider international arena.