A Climate Emergency

Last week Monday, the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) published its much-awaited 2021 report on the state of climate science, its sixth of such reports since 1988. The Six Assessment Report (AR6) by IPCC Working Group 1 took eight years of work from the world’s leading climate scientists and peer-reviewers and was approved by 195 governments. It represents the world’s full knowledge to date of the physical basis of climate change.

The landmark report has warned that major climate changes are now inevitable and irreversible. It reaffirmed that human influence has warmed Earth’s climate at a rate that is unprecedented in at least the last 2,000 years and is already affecting many weather and climate extremes in every region across the globe. Evidence of observed changes in extremes such as heatwaves, heavy precipitation, droughts, and tropical cyclones, and, in particular, their attribution to human influence, has strengthened since AR5, the authors added. ‘We have all the evidence we need to show we are in climate crisis,’ said three-time IPCC co-author, Sonia Seneviratne, professor at the Institute for Atmospheric and Climate Science of the ETH Zurich.

Under the 2015 Paris climate agreement, every country in the world set the ambitious goal to hold the rise in global average temperature ‘well below 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase even further to 1.5 degree Celsius.’ The authors of AR6 believe that 1.5 degree Celsius will be reached by 2040 in all scenarios, if emissions are not curtailed, as predicted in an earlier IPCC’s special report. This report submitted that the world would face severe climate impacts even with 1.5-degree Celsius warming, and such degrees of warming would likely entail ‘high multiple interrelated climate risks’ for ‘some vulnerable regions, including small islands and Least Developed Countries.’