The 200 members of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) began a two-week meeting yesterday to finalize its latest report, which is 12 chapters long and will be the most comprehensive report ever issued. It will detail the current climate conditions and project what we can expect through the end of the century. Their last report was issued in 2013. A draft of the report was shared with AFP a few weeks ago.
For the first time, the IPCC report has created five imaginary worlds showcasing outcomes that reveal how countries fare in different responses to climate change, taking into account population growth, GDP, and several other factors such as economics, technology, and demographics.
For example, if humans stop burning coal immediately, it will dramatically reduce the rate of global warming. But what if humans stop burning coal in the next five years? Or ten years? Or what if solar panels get really cheap and population growth slows down? How does that affect climate change? The new IPCC report is meant to help answer such questions using a set of 5 hypothetical policy scenarios.
-snip-
… in one world countries work together to develop low-cost, low-carbon technologies and put them into use quickly for everyone. In another, some countries or groups of people transition very quickly to wind, solar and other clean energy sources while others move much more slowly. In a third imaginary world, nationalism surges around the world and governments focus on local energy and food security rather than global economic changes to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
According to NPR’s story Climate Scientists Meet As Floods, Fires, Droughts And Heat Waves Batter Countries, there are three distinct takeaways to look for when the report is released.
- For the first time the report will issue its findings by region, significant because climate is changing differently depending on where you live.
- The science of climate change has improved greatly over the last decade. The report will utilize advanced climate modeling and take into account “all the climate research published before February 2021.”
- The IPCC will present five different scenarios with the intention of revealing how things will play out under different paths of action.
Under most of the scenarios, it's still possible to keep global warming below the 2 degree Celsius threshold set by the Paris agreement, says Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist at the University of California, Berkeley. In other words, there are many ways to address climate change, and the new report will help describe those options.