IPCC Report Explained
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Report was released August 9th. This article published in Quartz on August 12th breaks down the report by chapter. The data has been reviewed, the main points summarized and a heat map of scientists’ confidence in their conclusions is provided.
Here’s your guide to the IPCC’s latest assessment.
CH 1: Framing, context, methods
The first chapter comes out swinging with a bold political charge: It concludes with “high confidence” that the plans countries so far have put forward to reduce emissions are “insufficient” to keep warming well below 2°C, the goal enshrined in the 2015 Paris Agreement. While unsurprising on its own, it is surprising for a document that had to be signed off on by the same government representatives it condemns. It then lists advancements in climate science since the last IPCC report, as well as key evidence behind the conclusion that human-caused global warming is “unequivocal.”
HIGHLIGHTS
👀Scientists’ ability to observe the physical climate system has continued to improve and expand.
📈Since the last IPCC report, new techniques have provided greater confidence in attributing changes in extreme events to human-caused climate change.
🔬The latest generation of climate models is better at representing natural processes, and higher-resolution models that better capture smaller-scale processes and extreme events have become available.
CH 2: Changing state of the climate system
Chapter 2 looks backward in time to compare the current rate of climate changes to those that happened in the past. That comparison clearly reveals human fingerprints on the climate system. The last time global temperatures were comparable to today was 125,000 years ago, the concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide is higher than anytime in the last 2 million years, and greenhouse gas emissions are rising faster than anytime in the last 800,000 years.https://things.qz.com/2021/ar6-summary/chapter-2.html?c=001
HIGHLIGHTS
🥵Observed changes in the atmosphere, oceans, cryosphere, and biosphere provide unequivocal evidence of a world that has warmed. Over the past several decades, key indicators of the climate system are increasingly at levels unseen in centuries to millennia, and are changing at rates unprecedented in at least the last 2000 years
🧊Annual mean Arctic sea ice coverage levels are the lowest since at least 1850. Late summer levels are the lowest in the past 1,000 years.
🌊Global mean sea level (GMSL) is rising, and the rate of GMSL rise since the 20th century is faster than over any preceding century in at least the last three millennia. Since 1901, GMSL has risen by 0.20 [0.15–0.25] meters, and the rate of rise is accelerating.
By Amanda Shendruk, Tim McDonnell, David Yanofsky & Michael J. Coren
