Rutgers Professor Robert E. Kopp, a climate and sea-level rise expert who helped write the Climate Science Special Report that will be released today by the U.S. Global Change Research Program, is available for interviews. The report is Volume 1 of the U.S.’s Fourth National Climate Assessment. Kopp is the lead author of the chapter on potential surprises, and a co-author of the chapters on global change, climate models and scenarios, and sea-level change.
“The Climate Science Special Report is the most up-to-date comprehensive report on climate science available right now anywhere on the planet,” Kopp said. “It confirms that climate change is real, occurring today, and principally caused by human emissions.”
“It finds that, over the course of this century, global average sea level will very likely rise by 1 to 4 feet, with the possibility of as much as 8 feet for high-emission futures,” he added. “And the further we push the climate away from historical conditions, the greater the probability that it will surprise us – whether through simultaneous extreme weather events, large-scale shifts in the climate system, or pathways yet to be discovered.”
Kopp is a professor in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Rutgers University–New Brunswick, and directs Rutgers’ Institute of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences (EOAS). He also co-directs Rutgers–New Brunswick’s Coastal Climate Risk and Resilience Initiative.
Kopp’s research focuses on understanding uncertainty in past and future climate change, with major emphases on sea-level change and on the interactions between physical climate change and the economy. He is a lead author of Economic Risks of Climate Change: An American Prospectus and a co-director of the Climate Impact Lab. He served as a member of the National Academies’ Committee on Assessing Approaches to Updating the Social Cost of Carbon, as a contributing author of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s 2014 Fifth Assessment Report, and as a participant in sea-level rise expert groups for several states and cities. Web: http://www.bobkopp.net/
