What is Climate Change? Incompatibility Between the Definitions Used by Science and Policy Organizations is an Obstacle to Effective Action‪.‬

Believe it or not, the Framework Convention on Climate Change (FCCC), focused on international policy, and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), focused on scientific assessments in support of the FCCC, use different definitions of climate change. The two definitions are not compatible, certainly not politically and perhaps not even scientifically. This lack of coherence has contributed to the current international stalemate on climate policy, a stalemate that matters because climate change is real and actions are needed to improve energy policies and to reduce the vulnerability of people and ecosystems to climate effects. The latest attempt to move climate policy forward was the Ninth Conference of Parties to the FCCC, held December 1 to 12, 2003, in Milan, Italy, which took place amid uncertainty about whether the Kyoto Protocol, negotiated under the FCCC in 1997, would ever come into force. The protocol requires ratification from countries whose 1990 greenhouse gas emissions total 55 percent of the global total. This level will not be reached as long as countries with significant emissions (including the United States and, thus far, Russia) refuse to ratify the protocol. Not surprisingly, climate policy experts have begun to look beyond the Kyoto Protocol to the next stage of international climate policy.