Climate report warns of severities
Geneva, Tuesday
From flood to fire, 2021 has been a summer of extraordinary extremes across the globe — a sign that the impacts of climate change are already widespread and accelerating.
Such extremes, and their connection to human-caused climate change, are just one main theme in a landmark climate report released Monday by the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
Written by more than 230 leading scientists from countries around the world, it is part of the IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report — the most significant climate report published in years by the international science community.
The report is a synthesis of work from over 14,000 research citations. It is, in effect, a climate science encyclopedia — a summary of the latest scientific consensus on climate change and what the future portends, through the use of sophisticated climate models and knowledge of past conditions.
It is an update on how the Earth’s climate and our understanding of it have changed since the last such report in 2013.
“It is unequivocal that human influence has warmed the atmosphere, ocean and land,” the report states.
Many of the changes inflicted on the planet — especially our oceans — will be “irreversible for centuries to millennia,” and continued warming will lead to an acceleration of “extreme events unprecedented in the observational record,” it warns.
UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres called the report a “code red for humanity.”
Guterres said, “the alarm bells are deafening, and the evidence is irrefutable: greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuel burning and deforestation are choking our planet and putting billions of people at immediate risk,” CBS News’ Pamela Falk reports.
But also conveyed in the report is the knowledge that there’s still time to take action on the climate crisis.
The report makes clear that every increment of temperature rise matters, so less warming will help lessen disaster.
That will require steps like rapidly reducing methane emissions in the short term and greenhouse gases overall.
The science shows that if society is able to follow a low-carbon path into the future, it will “yield rapid and sustained effects to limit human-caused climate change,” the report says.
One of the report’s lead authors, Professor Ed Hawkins, from the University of Reading, UK, says the main messages he hopes readers will take away from the report are that “climate change is indisputably caused by human activities (primarily fossil fuel burning and deforestation), and that this is already affecting every region, including making extreme weather events worse.” - Agencies
