When the APS gets done, their policy statement will be even stronger than it is today.
http://www.aps.org/policy/statements/upload/climate-review-framing.pdf
The detection, attribution, and projection of climate change, especially under anthropogenic influence, are issues of major societal import. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has issued a series of reports over more than two decades, culminating in that of Working Group 1 of the Fifth Assessment Report (AR5 WG1) released in September, 2013 [
http://www.climatechange2013.org/]. Those reports have expressed increasingly confident consensus views of the importance, if not dominance, of anthropogenic influence on the global climate over the past 60 years.
The American Physical SocietyÂ’s (APS) Climate Change Statement Review (CCSR) is a process (mandated by the SocietyÂ’s bylaws) to reconsider its 2007 Statement on Climate Change, available at
Climate Change . The Subcommittee charged with making a recommendation on that matter has found, as part of its process, the need to better understand the IPCC consensus on climate science through a workshop that will dive deeply into some of the more uncertain aspects. In doing so, it will illuminate for itself, for the APS membership, and the broader public both the certainties and the boundaries of current climate science understanding.
The Subcommittee’s scope is the physical basis of climate change2 and we take the consensus as expressed in the AR5 WG1 Report and its Summary for Policy Makers (SPM). Below, we raise a set of topics and questions (in red) to prime and focus discussion at the workshop. These questions have not been chosen to “pick nits” or “pick cherries”, but rather to highlight fundamental issues in current understanding of the physical basis of climate change.3