We now have the clearest picture of how drastically the globe has changed as a result of human-caused climate change. The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released its most thorough report on the physical science of climate change today (IPCC).
“Climate change is an issue that we are experiencing right now. Inger Andersen, executive director of the United Nations Environment Programme, warned in a news conference today that "no one is safe, and it's becoming worse quicker." “Climate change must be treated as an imminent threat.”
In a nutshell, extreme occurrences such as floods, heatwaves, and droughts have grown harsher, according to the research. And scientists are even more certain than previously that human-caused greenhouse gas emissions, such as carbon dioxide and methane (which accounts for the bulk of "natural gas"), are to blame.
“We've known the globe is warming for decades, but this report informs us that recent climate changes are broad, fast, increasing, and unprecedented in thousands of years,” Ko Barrett, deputy chair of the IPCC, said in a news conference on August 8th. “The fact that human actions are driving climate change is undeniable.”
The IPCC is regarded as a major authority on climate science, with more than 230 writers from 66 nations contributing to the latest report. The findings released today are an update to a previous study issued in 2013, and they take into account new studies published in scholarly publications since then.
Since 2013, researchers have improved their ability to predict how much climate change influences specific weather events, which makes a huge difference this time. For example, a record-breaking heatwave in the Pacific Northwest of the United States and Southwest Canada in July collapsed highways and killed hundreds of people. A multinational team of academics determined in less than two weeks that the high heat would have been "almost unthinkable" without climate change.
According to the recent IPCC study, severe heat occurrences have increased in nearly every part of the world outside of the polar regions since the 1950s. According to the research, severe heatwaves currently occur five times more frequently throughout the world than they did between 1850 and 1900 (a period commonly referred to as the preindustrial period). Heat also exacerbates drought in some regions of the world. Droughts that previously only occurred once every decade are now 70 percent more frequent than they were in the preindustrial era.
The climate problem, on the other hand, has a wide range of and far-reaching repercussions. Severe storms and floods are also becoming more common. Rainstorms that used to come once per decade are now occurring 30 percent more regularly. When it comes to tropical cyclones, the proportion of significant storms (category 3 or above) has increased, implying that hurricanes and typhoons have become more powerful.
During the press conference, Paola Andrea Arias Gómez, one of the IPCC report's authors, remarked, "Extreme weather is occurring with more frequency over the whole world." “We can now say that human activity is mostly responsible for these changes.”
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