The IPCC opens the final stage of review of its new report on climate change

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) today opened a two-week meeting to review and approve the first part of its sixth assessment report, which coincides with extreme weather events in different parts of the world that could be catalysts for political decisions at the UN Climate Change Conference (COP26), scheduled from October 31 to November 12.

“We have told the world that science has spoken and that it is now up to policymakers to take action,” IPCC Chair Hoesung Lee said at the opening of the meeting, which was the only public part of the meeting.

The report to be analyzed and debated is entitled “Climate Change 2021: The Physical Science That Underpins It” and will show evidence of why the climate has changed and will better explain the human influence on extreme weather events, such as the recent floods in Central Europe, China and India and the heat wave in North America.

The executive director of the UN Environment Programme, Msuya Joyce, said this report will give the world a better understanding of extreme events and the impact of the pandemic on climate change and air pollution, and hoped that this will serve to stimulate “global action as we approach COP26”.

“After years of promises, but not enough action, (extreme weather events) are warnings that we have to put ourselves above this crisis that threatens our collective future,” he said.

But as the UN Executive Secretary for Climate Change, Patricia Espinosa, pointed out in her speech, “having scientific information available and following it are often two different things”, but she trusted that on this occasion, when the data have several climate catastrophes as a backdrop, policy makers will assume the decisions that are required.

“To them I say, science is not seeing the world as we would like it to be, but as it is. It’s not about politics, it’s about reality, and the reality is that we’re not on track to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement and limit warming to 1.5 degrees.”

Espinosa, relying on scientific data, recalled that “we are going in the opposite direction, towards a rise of 3 degrees.

This first IPCC report will give all the scientific support that governments require to decide the commitments they make at the Glasgow climate conference next November and in which, without a doubt, the covid-19 pandemic and its consequences will also influence.

The head of climate change at the UN said that countries can only be expected to reach that appointment – postponed for a year by the health crisis – with clear proposals to reach net zero emissions by 2050, with clear strategies to achieve it and similar plans in the horizon 2030.

A part of the community concerned about the climate crisis considers that the IPCC, which is thirty years old, has been too soft in presenting the data in its previous reports to safely avoid being labeled as catastrophists and this being used by climate change deniers.

Leaks from recent months of the report that is scheduled to be released on August 9 suggest that the new data is bleak, including forecasts of rising temperatures.

The content of the report, whose final review stage – before being submitted to the current discussion with government delegates – took 16 months, will be discussed in virtual meetings, in the same way as the previous stage was carried out, with the participation of 234 authors who reviewed all the scientific information (14,000 articles) available globally on climate change and peer-reviewed.

The synthesis of this work is this sixth evaluation report, which will offer more detailed regional information, with the purpose of being used for risk measurement.

The IPCC publishes such reports every six to seven years; the last one that was released in 2014 and served as the scientific basis for the discussions that led to the Paris Agreement on climate change.

Source: EFE Agro