UN science panel set to issue stark warning with key report on climate change

Experts will summarize info on global warming, examine options to reduce greenhouse gas emissions ahead of climate summit in November

By AFP


Flames leap from trees as the Dixie Fire jumps Highway 89 north of Greenville in Plumas County, California on Aug. 3, 2021. Dry and windy conditions have led to increased fire activity as firefighters battle the blaze which ignited July 14. (AP Photo/Noah Berger)

PARIS — As heart-stopping images of fires and floods dominate news cycles worldwide, the UN’s climate science panel will unveil on Monday its much-anticipated projections for temperature and sea-level rises less than three months before a crucial climate summit in Scotland.After two weeks of virtual negotiations, 195 nations approved the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) comprehensive assessment of past and future warming on Friday in the form of a “summary for policymakers.”

The text — vetted and approved line by line, word by word — is likely to paint a grim picture of accelerating climate change and dire threats on the horizon.

On the heels of deadly floods in India, China and northern Europe as well as asphalt-melting heatwaves in North America and southern Europe, the IPCC’s report is the first so-called assessment report since 2014.

Both the world and the science have changed a lot since then.

With increasingly sophisticated technology allowing scientists to measure climate change and predict its future path, the report will project global temperature changes until the end of the century under different emissions scenarios.

Based almost entirely on published research, it could forecast — even under optimistic scenarios — a temporary “overshoot” of the 1.5 degrees Celsius target of the Paris Agreement, and revise upwards its estimates for long-term sea-level rise.

It is also expected to reflect huge progress in so-called attribution science, which allows experts to link individual extreme weather events directly to man-made climate change.

While the underlying IPCC report is purely scientific, the summary for policymakers is negotiated by national representatives, and therefore subject to competing priorities.

Belgian climate physicist and former IPCC co-chair Jean-Pascal Ypersele, who was party to the negotiations, said the talks were guided by the underlying science.

“I can testify that the authors of the #ClimateReport had the last word on every sentence in the SPM, which really was a Summary FOR (and not BY) policymakers,” he said on Twitter.

The report comes less than three months before the COP26 climate talks in Glasgow, which are seen as vital for humanity’s chance of limiting the worst impacts of global warming.

“This is going to be the starkest warning yet that human behavior is alarmingly accelerating global warming and this is why COP26 has to be the moment we get this right,” COP26 President Alok Sharma said over the weekend.

“We can’t afford to wait two years, five years, 10 years -– this is the moment,” he told a British newspaper.

French climatologist Corinne Le Quere congratulated the delegates on Friday for finalizing “the text of what I think will be one of the most important scientific reports ever published.”

There will be two further parts to the IPCC’s latest round of climate assessments, known as AR6.

A working group report on climate impacts, a draft of which was exclusively obtained by AFP, is set for release in February 2022.

Another report focusing on solutions for reducing emissions and adapting to climate change will be out the following month.

August 9, 2021 | 4 Comments »

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4 Comments / 4 Comments

  1. @Edgar

    If you look at the ice core data for the last 300,000 years or so (there are graphs on the Internet), it looks like we are sitting on the top of the latest high temperature peak and after the peak, we are heading into a very deep cooling period, possibly another very long ice age, as happened cyclically before because of the changes in the Sun cycles and the Earth’s orbit.

    If I had to take a wild guess, the PTB are aware of this (how can they not be?), and they are trying to kill off the weakest segments of the population and to cut down the population overall because they figure there won’t be enough heat and produce for the 7 billion people to survive the cold.

    Those who are as old as we are now probably won’t live to see the start of the cooling off period but the great- and great-grandchildren will.

  2. @Edgar
    Well stated Edgar. It is simply a transfer of wealth scheme to eternally support the Chinese at the expense of the West.

  3. @EDGAR….We have been through this many times before, and have seen uncontrovertable charts… .going back tens of thousands of years, which have clearly shown that the earth’s climate has cycles, and some have been far worse than this projected one. There have been “projections” going on for many years, not one of which has eventyated. The jolly old oceans keep producing the vast majority of our oxygen, the hothouse gases keep escaping through the hole in the Ozone Layer, and so on.

    We’ve had Ice ages, mini ice ages witin our own lifetmes and this seems to be the natural way the Earth operates. Many scientists say it’s caused by the “wobble”, and who is to say they’re wrong. They have good qualficacions, as good as the naysayers. In the meantime we are still here and as long as Ice blasts come down from the North Pole to blanket much of the US, as it always does, we will survive the same way as before. Chilly but muffled up.

  4. Not a single act of this investication and report is worth a “spit”. There was a clear example published yeaterday that the Biden Govyt had ordered enough dolar panels to light 90,000 homes. But added to this was the info that the coal burned to make these panels -IN CHINA- would emit as much carbon as the panels were supposed to eliminate. This sid not exclude the production of othe e extremely toxic matter, which preumably they just dump.

    Since China , most of Asia and India plus Africa are not scrupulously eliminating their carbon emissions (and how can they for heaven’s sake) what the rest of us do, with MUCH time, trouble and expense…is Useless.