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„Promoting evidence-based decision-making“: Qatar and PIK announce creation of climate change research institute

05.12.2012 - Qatar Foundation in partnership with the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) announced the creation of a pioneering climate change research institute. It will be the first of its kind “in a country whose wealth is founded on fossil fuels,” PIK’s director Hans Joachim Schellnhuber said. “Qatar declares to confront the climate challenge, and to do so by promoting research and evidence-based decision-making. This might be a turning point for a transition towards sustainability.” The science is clear, Schellnhuber said, that global greenhouse-gas emissions from fossil fuel consumption “have to decrease sharply by 2020 if we want to avoid dangerous climate change”.

Doha World Climate Summit: Schellnhuber gives talk to high-ranking representatives of states

12/06/2012 - “Don’t ask what global climate protection can do for your country; ask what your country can do for climate protection…” – it was by rephrasing former US president John F. Kennedy’s famous words that Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK), addressed the highest-ranking representatives of states in Doha. He had been asked to present the keynote at the gala dinner on Tuesday night that opened the high-level segment of the world climate summit COP18 – an unsual honour for a scientist.

4-degrees briefing for the World Bank: The risks of a future without climate policy

11/19/2012 - Humankind’s emissions of greenhouse gases are breaking new records every year. Hence we’re on a path towards 4-degree global warming probably as soon as by the end of this century. This would mean a world of risks beyond the experience of our civilization – including heat waves, especially in the tropics, a sea-level rise affecting hundreds of millions of people, and regional yield failures impacting global food security. These are some of the results of a report for the World Bank, conducted by the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) and Climate Analytics in Berlin. The poorest in the world are those that will be hit hardest, making development without climate policy almost impossible, the researchers conclude.

„Green Growth“– Fairytale or Strategy? Climate Lecture 2012 at TU Berlin

12/03/2012 - Economic growth does not only lead to rising turnovers and incomes but also increases greenhouse-gas emissions. Can “Green Growth” be a way out of this dilemma? Is it “a fairytale or a strategy”? Right now, issues like this are being debated at the international climate summit in Doha. Two scientists explored solution paths at the Climate Lecture at Technische Universität Berlin this Monday in front of 1000 guests – British growth critic Professor Tim Jackson and the chief economist of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and Professor at TU Berlin, Ottmar Edenhofer.

Website on climate impacts in Germany starts in pilot phase

12/01/12 - For the first time, the new website “KlimafolgenOnline” presents information on regional impacts of climate change all over Germany for local decision makers. The project from the Potsdam-Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) and WetterOnline is starting its pilot phase and is now open to interested users. Information is provided for experts from forestry to building with resolutions as fine as 10x10 kilometers. The website is also presented at the current climate summit COP18 in Doha.

„You cannot negotiate with nature“: Leading scientists on COP18 in Doha

11/26/2012 - Media worldwide asked leading scientists of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) for comments and interviews on the world climate summit COP18 that started today in Doha, Qatar. Despite the widespread scepticism that the meeting of representatives of nearly 200 states will achieve much progress, PIK’s director Hans Joachim Schellnhuber stressed that much is at stake for the international community if global warming goes on unabated. “You cannot negotiate with nature,” Schellnhuber told the Chinese news agency Xinhua. “While we are quarreling, nature will just march on."

Projected sea-level rise may be underestimated

11/28/2012 - The rate of sea-level rise in the past decades is greater than projected by the latest assessments of the IPCC, while global temperature increases in good agreement with its best estimates. This is shown by a study now published in the journal Environmental Research Letters. Stefan Rahmstorf from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) and his colleagues compare climate projections to actual observations from 1990 up to 2011. That sea level is rising faster than expected could mean that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) sea-level rise projections for the future may be biased low as well, their results suggest.

A warning system for the planet

11/16/2012 - Earth’s ecosystems provide benefits like food or drinking water that are of crucial importance for the well-being of humankind. But although accumulated assessments indicate increasing system failures threatening livelihoods and lives, so far no centralized system exists to monitor and report ecosystem status and changes. Aiming at a better understanding of the consequences of ecosystem service and biodiversity loss, a team of scientists, including Kirsten Thonicke and some of her colleagues from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK), propose “A Global System for Monitoring Ecosystem Service Change” in a paper recently published in the science magazine “BioScience”.

Potsdam hosts first World Climate Impacts Conference

11/15/2012 - The first World Climate Impacts Conference, IMPACTS WORLD 2013, will be held next year in Potsdam, Germany. "Our climate future will be largely determined by the choices we make in the next couple of decades – everything between 2°C and 10°C global warming by 2300 is possible,” says Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research which is organising the event together with the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA). “Impacts science has come of age now and can finally draw the dramatic sectoral and regional pictures associated with specific increases in the Earth’s mean surface temperature”.

Artists as chroniclers of climate

11/12/2012 - From thick snow flurry in snow-covered villages to the white rooftops of Paris – the Arp Museum in Remagen, Rhineland-Palatinate, is currently showing distinguished winter landscapes of impressionism in the exhibition “Lichtgestöber”. Scientific advisers to the exhibition are, among others, Friedrich-Wilhelm Gerstengarbe und Peter C. Werner from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. In the show that will be on display until April 14th 2013 about 55 works by artists like Courbet, Monet, van Gogh, Gauguin, Pissarro, Liebermann, Slevogt or Corinth focus on winter in all its facets.