IPCC by the Numbers

Climate Watch intern Chris Penalosa contributed reporting on this blog post.

Photo: Aerial View of the Arctic Ocean, Photo.com.

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.

Robert Cervero is a transportation and land-use policy professor at UC Berkeley. In addition to teaching at transit development, Cervero has authored numerous academic journal articles on the Bay Area’s transit systems. He’ll be the review editor for the IPCC’s chapter on human settlements, infrastructure and spatial planning.

Climate Watch intern Chris Penalosa mapped where California’s IPCC contributors are based. Click on the icons to find out more about them.
View IPCC AR5 Authors from California in a larger map

Update 7/8/10
Here’s a complete list of the California participants:

UCLA
Alex Hall

Stanford
Ken Caldeira
Chris Field
Stephen Schneider
Noah Diffenbaugh
David Lobell
Terry Root
John Weyant

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Michael Wehner
Jayant Sathaye
Ryan Wiser
Mark Levine
Lynn Price
James McMahon

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
Karl Taylor
Peter Gleckler

UCI
Michael Prather
Eric Rignot

CALTech
Ronald Kwok

UCSD
Lynne Talley
Dean Roemmich

UC Berkeley
Maximilian Auffhammer
Kirk Robert Smith
William Michael Hanemann
Richard Norgaard
Lee Schipper
Robert Cervero

Climate Central
Philip Duffy

Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute
Peter Brewer

CSU San Marcos
Victoria Fabry