The IPCC will release a comprehensive report on climate change ahead of landmark UN discussions of global responses to the crisis.
At 6 pm AEST Monday, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) will publicly release their vital report on climate change.
The report will provide nations with comprehensive, advanced and up-to-date information about climate change, to help guide policy decisions.
It comes just months before the UN’s Glasgow Climate Change Conference, which will run from October 31 to November 12 2021.
The overall assessment report, titled the “Sixth Assessment Report”, consists of three parts.
Only the first part will be released on Monday, which looks at the physical science basis for climate change.
The IPCC report is coming out tomorrow. As a climate scientist, I’d like you to know: I don’t have hope.
I have something better: certainty.
We know exactly what’s causing climate change. We can absolutely 1) avoid the worst and 2) build a better world in the process.
— Kate Marvel (@DrKateMarvel) August 8, 2021
The remaining two parts will be published in 2022.
Chief Research Scientist of the CSIRO, David Karoly, has been involved with IPCC reports multiple times, and this year was a review editor for one chapter.
In an article published by The Conversation, he explained that of the two parts to be published in 2022:
“One will cover the impacts, adaptation and vulnerability of, for example, people, ecosystems, agriculture, cities, and more. The other will cover the economics and mitigation of climate change.”
234 leading scientists from over 60 countries are involved in the writing, assessing, reviewing and approving processes of the report.
The scientists have each been approved by government representatives of the countries involved, which, according to Karoly, “ensures the reports are relevant to the policy interests of all governments“.
Further, more than 14,00 research papers on climate change have been evaluated in the report.
The IPCC publishes these reports around every seven years, the last being published in 2013 and the first in 1990.
Monday’s report was set to be published in 2020. However, it was delayed due to COVID-19 restrictions.
Many are particularly eager for this coming report, as the 2020s have shown to be a crucial time for climate action.
In January 2021, NASA confirmed that 2020 had tied with 2016 for the warmest year on record.
Director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, Gavin Schmidt, then emphasised that this result indicated the dire condition of global warming:
“The last seven years have been the warmest seven years on record, typifying the ongoing and dramatic warming trend,” he said.
“Whether one year is a record or not is not really that important – the important things are long-term trends. With these trends, and as the human impact on the climate increases, we have to expect that records will continue to be broken.”
Importantly, the IPCC report will not include observations of this year’s weather patterns or climate events. Instead, it is limited to drawing from papers published before 2021.
Speaking to The Guardian, Michael Mann, professor of atmospheric science at Pennsylvania State University, highlighted the impacts of this limitation.
“The IPCC reports always seem to be playing catch-up with what we’re witnessing on the ground. Our own work suggests that the models upon which [most IPCC projections] are made still aren’t quite capturing some of the mechanisms that are important here.”
Nevertheless, reading the report may be valuable not only for policy-makers, but for all individuals.
Hopefully, with media attention, the report has already earned, its release may promote public awareness of the increasing threat posed by climate change.
Today blazing fires smash Greece. Tomorrow, catastrophe, with next UN/IPCC report. The planet is overheating badly. A global pandemic is very hard, a global #ClimateEmergency much, much worse. We can still act but @ScottMorrisonMPs’ refusal to get serious on climate is criminal.
— Peter Garrett (@pgarrett) August 8, 2021
