SOURCE: Grist
DATE: March 22, 2018
SNIP: The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is the gold-standard for mainstream climate science. Problem is, the last IPCC report came out way back in 2013. As it turns out, we’ve learned a lot about our climate since then, and most of that new information paints an increasingly urgent picture of the need to slash fossil-fuel emissions as soon as possible.
The next IPCC report isn’t planned for public release until the fall of 2019. Gathering consensus takes time, and the result is that IPCC reports are out of date before they’re published and necessarily conservative.
Actually, a helluva lot has changed in our understanding of the Earth’s climate system since the 2013 IPCC report. Here are some of the highlights:
- Sea level rise is going to be much worse than we thought.
- Antarctica’s massive ice sheets could collapse much more quickly than we thought.
- Extreme weather is here and can now be linked to climate change in real time.
- Global warming of 1.5 degrees Celsius is pretty much locked in.
- We’ve already lost entire ecosystems, most notably coral reefs.
The climate system is moving much more quickly than we thought, and human action to curb climate change is moving much too slowly.