: The One Silver Lining in the Bleak IPCC Report #WorldNEWS As heat waves, hurricanes and other extreme weather events around the world hit harder and more often in recent years, scientists have become

The One Silver Lining in the Bleak IPCC Report #WorldNEWS
As heat waves, hurricanes and other extreme weather events around the world hit harder and more often in recent years, scientists have become more confident than ever before in placing the blame unequivocally on human-made climate change.
That shift was reflected in a starkly updated section of the latest version of the International Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) Assessment Report, published Aug. 9, which compiles years of climate science into what is widely considered the definitive document outlining the current state of knowledge on the atmospheric changes happening around us, and what the future may hold. The overall message of the new report—the sixth iteration of the document—was worrying, describing large average global temperature rises in recent decades and a shrinking window to reduce emissions and avert worst-scenario outcomes. But the scientists’ increased confidence in linking current extreme weather to climate change may be a notable bright spot, offering a potentially crucial weapon that climate activists and communities affected by heat waves and flooding can use to pressure politicians and industry to take action before it’s too late.
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On worldwide extreme weather, the difference between the new IPCC assessment and the last such document, published in 2014, is dramatic, reflecting a rapid coalescence of scientific understanding that has taken place in recent years. The 2014 report took a fairly cautious tone in describing how climate change was affecting extreme weather, stating primarily that “some” changes in extreme weather in recent decades had been “linked to human influences. ” In a scientific report, that sort of language is a kind of hedge, the authors perhaps having suspected that climate change was the primary cause of worsening heat waves around the world, but not having enough evidence to say it definitively.
But over the past seven years, a slow trickle of scientific papers linking such weather events to human-caused climate change has become a torrent, and the new report’s summary for policymakers offers a radical update to the old IPCC line, expressing “high confidence,” for instance, that human emissions were the “main driver” of more frequent and extreme heat waves around the world. (The last such summary only stated that emissions “contributed” to worldwide extreme heat. ) The worst of those heat waves, the report states, are now likely to occur almost five times as often as before.
And the new report goes well beyond heat waves. For example, it states that human influence was likely the main cause of increased extreme rainfall in many regions, and that it “contributed” to more droughts in some parts of the world as well.