Your questions about the new IPCC climate change report answered

Ars asked for your questions about the recently released final draft of the first section of the new Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, and you delivered. A number of the questions were about the climate change impacts and mitigation sections that have not yet been released, but we’ll certainly keep those topics in mind when that information comes out next spring. There are also a few questions related to complex topics that we plan to cover in more detail soon.

All that said, here are some of the biggest reoccurring questions we were able to answer.

How are the IPCC reports written? Do governments get to edit it?

The process is laid out nicely on the IPCC website. A number of scientists are chosen from nominations to be lead authors for different chapters of the report. For the physical science section, for example, 259 lead authors were chosen for its 14 chapters—each summarizing existing research on a different topic. The lead authors take on this project as unpaid volunteers, receiving nothing but some time from their employers to fit the work into their schedules.