GENEVA, (Pakistan Point News - 09th Aug, 2021) The UN's top scientific body on climate change will begin releasing on Monday its long-awaited new assessment on global warming's impact, three months before world leaders gather in Scotland to forge a new plan to limit global temperature increases.
The Geneva-based Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) will present the first of four reports in its latest assessment cycle, starting with an analysis of the stacks of climate studies since the last major evaluation seven years ago, German news agency dpa reported on Monday.
That humans - through the burning of fossil fuels, intensive farming, deforestation, livestock breeding and pollution - are above all responsible for climate change is undisputed among scientists.
Just how big that influence is will be laid out on Monday by the IPCC, which signals its level of confidence in scientific conclusions using labels such as likely, very likely, extremely likely and virtually certain.
IPCC spokesman Jonathan Lynn said the assessment, which is the body's sixth since 1990, is getting into a cutting edge area of science, where we can increasingly say to what extent climate change is responsible for extreme weather events, disasters and so on happening around the world.
The last comprehensive assessment was in 2013-14, and since then Earth has experienced six of the warmest years on record.
Globally, the average surface temperature is about 1.2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels and barrelling towards the 1.5-degree threshold, scientists say humans must stay at or below to avoid the most catastrophic effects of climate change.
World leaders will meet at the COP26 Climate Change Conference in Glasgow, Scotland, in November, in what is being described as the most important meeting on the climate crisis since the 2015 Paris summit.
In the 2015 Paris climate accord, nations set a goal of staying below 2 degrees, and preferably to 1.5 degrees, by cutting greenhouse gas emissions.
If not, the consensus is that extreme weather, including droughts and flooding, will become more common, sea levels will rise higher, Arctic ice will melt more swiftly, and many plants and animals will be unable to adapt.
Human action was more tightly linked to climate change in each of the previous five IPCC assessments. Although the findings set off alarm bells among environmental campaigners and in some corridors of power, the world has continued to fall behind on its climate goals.
But a slew of recent disasters has once again underscored the urgency of the crisis, from the wildfires and heatwaves scorching southern Europe and North America's west, to widespread flooding in China and Germany.
The report issued on Monday will address such extreme weather events, their connection to human-made climate change, and provide detailed region-by-region information on their impact.
The document is also set to offer forward-looking assessments of our possible future world given different emissions scenarios.
The IPCC does not conduct its research, rather it summarises the state of scientific knowledge on climate change.
The new assessment, which will be delivered in parts until 2022, involved 234 authors from 66 countries. Their findings are bundled for political decision-makers in a paper that the 195 member countries of the IPCC then approve.
The second part of the IPCC assessment will deal with impacts, adaptation and vulnerability to climate change, while the third looks at mitigation efforts. A final document synthesising the three earlier efforts will then be released at some point next year, said the dpa report.
