2023 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #12

A chronological listing of news and opinion articles posted on the Skeptical Science Facebook Page during the past week: Sun, Mar 19, 2023 thru Sat, Mar 25, 2023.

Story of the Week

Q&A: IPCC wraps up its most in-depth assessment of climate change

The final part of the world’s most comprehensive assessment of climate change – which details the “unequivocal” role of humans, its impacts on “every region” of the world and what must be done to solve it – has now been published in full by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

The synthesis report is the last in the IPCC’s sixth assessment cycle, which has involved 700 scientists in 91 countries. Overall, the full cycle of reports has taken eight years to complete.

The report sets out in the clearest and most evidenced detail yet how humans are responsible for the 1.1C of temperature rise seen since the start of the industrial era.

It also shows how the impacts of this level of warming are already deadly and disproportionately heaped upon the world’s most vulnerable people.

The report notes that policies in place by the end of 2021 – the cut-off date for evidence cited in the assessment – would likely see temperatures exceed 1.5C this century and reach around 3.2C by 2100.

In many parts of the world, humans and ecosystems will be unable to adapt to this amount of warming, it says. And the losses and damages will “escalate with every increment” of global temperature rise.

But it also lays out how governments can still take action to avoid the worst of climate change, with the rest of this decade being crucial for deciding impacts for the rest of the century. The report says:

“There is a rapidly closing window of opportunity to secure a liveable and sustainable future for all…The choices and actions implemented in this decade will have impacts now and for thousands of years.”

The report shows that many options for tackling climate change – from wind and solar power to tackling food waste and greening cities – are already cost effective, enjoy public support and would come with co-benefits for human health and nature.

At a press briefing, leading climate scientist and IPCC author Prof Friederike Otto said the report highlights “not only the urgency of the problem and the gravity of it, but also lots of reasons for hope – because we still have the time to act and we have everything we need”.

Carbon Brief’s team of journalists has delved through each page of the IPCC’s AR6 full synthesis report to produce a digestible summary of the key findings and graphics.

Click here to access the entire article as originally posted on the Carbon Brief website

Q&A: IPCC wraps up its most in-depth assessment of climate change by Multiple Authors, IPCC, Carbon Brief, Mar 23, 2023;

Links posted on Facebook

Sun, Mar 19, 2023

Mon, Mar 20, 2023

Tue, Mar 21, 2023

Wed, Mar 22, 2023

Thu, Mar 23, 2023

Fri, Mar 24, 2023

Sat, Mar 25, 2023

Posted by John Hartz on Saturday, 25 March, 2023

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