CEN - Center for Earth System Research and Sustainability
Centerfor Earth System Research and Sustainability (CEN)
A talk with IPCC Lead Author Prof. Hermann Held“Climate protection and economic growth can go hand in hand”
17 April 2014, by Ute Kreis
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Prof. Hermann Held’s research focuses on sustainable solutions to the climate problem.
On Tuesday, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released the third part of its Assessment Report on the current state of knowledge concerning...
On Tuesday, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released the third part of its Assessment Report on the current state of knowledge concerning climate change. Professor Hermann Held, Chair of the Research Unit “Sustainability and Global Change” (FNU) and Principal Investigator at the Cluster of Excellence CliSAP, was on of the report’s Lead Authors. We spoke with the physicist and economist about the economic aspects of climate change, important innovations in the latest report, and on how different disciplines can be combined with regard to our climate.
CliSAP: Mr. Held, several hundred researchers worked for several years on preparing the recently published third part of the Assessment Report, without pay and on top of their normal duties. The result was a work over two thousand pages long. Was it worth it?
Held: The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, determines the difference between what we concretely know about climate change and what remains controversial. That’s enormously important, because it’s the only way to escape the unfortunate situation of talk-show formats: one expert claims one thing, the other claims just the opposite. What gets ignored in the process is that some theories have almost no backing whatsoever in the scientific community. Though the Assessment Reports don’t tell people what to think, they do provide clarity on which statements are sound and reliable and which aren’t.