The latest review of climate literature finds that the window to avert catastrophic warming with existing tools is rapidly closing.
A new United Nations report reaffirms what world governments have known and failed to deal with for decades: that climate change is our fault, is already causing devastation around the globe and will continue to get worse.
How much worse is entirely up to us.
The assessment from the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is an up-to-date scientific understanding of planetary warming, as well as its current and future impacts. The international consortium of researchers left no room for debate over the cause of the global crisis.
“It is unequivocal that human influence has warmed the atmosphere, ocean and land,” reads a summary for policymakers. “Widespread and rapid changes in the atmosphere, ocean, cryosphere and biosphere have occurred.”
The lengthy document — authored by 234 scientists from 66 countries and which cites more than 14,000 scientific papers — is the first major update since 2013, when the world’s leading climate science body determined that humans were the “dominant cause” of global warming.
