http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/bsp/hi/pdfs/27_09_13_ipccsummary.pdf
The summary is labelled as a summary for policy-makers. As such it provides statements of agreed judgements made by climate scientists. It provides selected illustrative support for those judgements but not in a way that can be independently sense checked. It is hoped that the evidence reports will eventually provide that data in a suitable form.
For some unexplained reason, the uncertainty in data points is provided with 90% confidence intervals when the standard for science is the 95% confidence interval. This is not a major criticism but indicates a willingness to report an apparently higher degree of certainty by up to 20 %. Much larger uncertainties are found in the choice of model rather than how well the essentially similar models agree with each other. Chief among these choices are vertical energy flow mechanisms, which are not well modelled.
In the period 1998 to 2012 global mean surface temperature has risen by less than measurement precision , and may even have decreased. The models all predicted an increase.
Rather than stop there, the authors point to some successes in the modelling and then make some predictions using those models.
In most sciences failure to model observations would be a cause of some humility and a pause while the cause of error was identified and understood and hopefully lessons learned. Not so with climate change sciences. Perhaps it is too important a subject? Any statement is better than no statement?
Given the inherent uncertainties and lack of testable facts until after the fact, the risk management response is hard to specify.
Resilience management, on the other hand, can be undertaken by individuals and businesses and generates very low uncertainty, with immediate returns on investment and makes rational allowance for some degree of excursion from the norm. In my view, the attention should be on the measurement of resilience and resilience risk management.
Insurance is a very valuable part of the resilience management tool set. Perhaps insurers could explain a bit more about resilience assessment?
