The latest IPCC report makes clear that we have everything we need to combat rising temperatures. The only question is whether we care enough about the future of humanity to do it
If you want to celebrate a great human accomplishment, forget the moon landing or Purple Rain. Celebrate this. For the last 34 years, tens of thousands of scientists around the world have labored to produce a report that tries to quantify just how fucked life on Earth really is due to our hellbent consumption of fossil fuels. The report, which is thousands of pages long and is revised and expanded every six years or so, is arguably the most important scientific document that human beings have ever produced. It not only attempts to synthesize the complex interplay of chemistry, physics, and biology in our rapidly warming world, but it also raises the question of whether we humans are rational creatures that will take action to avoid our own doom, and the doom of much we know and love, or we are just frogs sitting in the proverbial pot as the water boils and we cook ourselves to death.
The group of scientists and policy experts behind the report are part of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which was formed in 1988 to help policy-makers understand and take action on climate risk. Every few years the IPCC releases a new assessment, which consists of several reports prepared by three working groups. Working Group I focuses on the scientific evidence for climate change; Working Group II on the impacts, adaptation, and vulnerabilities; and Working Group III on mitigation. The latest version of the report, known as the Sixth Assessment, has been released in three parts over the last few months; the mitigation report, or WG3 report, was released last week. Two hundred and seventy authors from 67 countries contributed to the 2,913 page-long report.
The WG3 report may be the most important of the three reports, if only because it handicaps various strategies to address the climate crisis. Is advanced nuclear power critical to limiting warming to 2 C? Can carbon dioxide removal technology scale up fast enough and cheap enough to make a difference? Climate-wise, is recycling more effort than it’s worth? If there is a single message in the WG3 report, Andrew Dessler, a climate scientist at Texas A&M, told me, it is this: “Things are bad, we can fix this, but the window is closing.”
Unfortunately, that has been the message in more or less every version of this report for the last 20 years and nobody has paid much attention to it. But what’s different this time is that the urgency is palpable. U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said the report revealed “a litany of broken climate promises” by governments and corporations who put the power and influence of fossil fuels above the welfare of the planet: “It is a file of shame, cataloguing the empty pledges that put us firmly on track toward an unlivable world.”
Let me repeat that last phrase, just in case you glossed over it: firmly on track toward an unlivable world.
What’s also different this time is that the report lands in a world that is not exactly, shall we say, science-friendly. We live in a mud-bog of anti-vaxxers, QAnon, the Big Lie, and Fox News propaganda. The report also arrives in the middle of a barbaric war in Ukraine, where atrocities committed by Russian soldiers dominate the news, making long-term thinking about the fragility of the Earth’s climate feel like a luxury some of us can’t afford.
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