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Seven years after its last report, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has published its much-anticipated report on climate change on August 9, and the conclusions are alarming.
The UN’s climate experts responsible for assessing the state of scientific knowledge on climate change, its causes, and impacts released the first part of their assessment on Friday, August 6. This is IPCC’s most scientifically robust report, offering the most current information available to policymakers in the relevant fields to develop long term programs.
Since the last assessment report in 2014, our planet has experienced an unprecedented warming: the past five years have been the warmest on record since at least 1850. The rise of sea level has accelerated considerably (three times faster than in the period 1901-1971), as has the melting of the ice caps.
The IPCC warns in its report that the warming of the planet Earth could reach the threshold of +1.5°C around 2030. Humanity, already hit by heat waves and floods in series, is threatened by this acceleration that will cause “unprecedented” disasters.
Furthermore, human activity continues to be responsible for a large part of the +1.1°C gain since the 19th century, as the report estimates.
French paleoclimatologist Valérie Masson-Delmotte explained, “Human activities are the cause of climate change, this is indisputable, and human influence is making many extreme weather events more frequent and severe, most notably heat waves, torrential rain events and in many regions, droughts.”
However, scientists confirm that the magnitude and speed of the changes are direct results of our continuous release of CO2 gas emissions, which means that immediate and large-scale cuts of these emissions could help stabilize global temperatures.
The second part of the report which concerns the impacts of this climatic crisis is planned for February 2022. It will show in detail how life on Earth will be irreversibly transformed in thirty years. While the third part, which deals with solutions, is expected in March 2022.
