: The Latest IPCC Report Says We’re Probably Going to Pass the 1.5°C Climate Threshold. What’s Next? #WorldNEWS Three years ago the United Nations climate science body issued a landmark report warning

The Latest IPCC Report Says We’re Probably Going to Pass the 1.5°C Climate Threshold. What’s Next? #WorldNEWS
Three years ago the United Nations climate science body issued a landmark report warning that the planet was on track to blow past efforts to limit global warming to 1. 5°C above preindustrial levels, a threshold that it warned would bring catastrophic and irreversible effects of climate change. But in that same report, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) emphasized that many paths remained open for us to limit that damage—so long as we acted immediately.
On Monday, the IPCC published a new document with a far less optimistic frame. In it, the group says that the pathway to limit warming to the 1. 5°C mark has narrowed and lays out only one plausible scenario to meet that goal—one that would require an extraordinary level of action, and even then, would offer no guarantee.
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“It is still possible to forestall many of the most dire impacts,” says Ko Barrett, a vice chair of the IPCC, and deputy assistant administrator for research at the U. S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. “But it really requires unprecedented transformational change, [and] rapid and immediate reduction of greenhouse-gas emissions. ”
Documents like this can be disheartening—in fact, they probably should be. The report, the first in a string the IPCC plans to release in the coming months as part of its sixth Assessment Report, covers the latest science on physical impacts of climate change and runs through a long list of areas where science has definitively established that humans are wreaking havoc on the planet, from the way water circulates across the planet to thawing permafrost.
But the report also offers a reminder that, in the words of Hoesung Lee, chair of the IPCC and professor in the economics of climate change, energy and sustainable development at Korea University, “every bit of warming matters. ” No matter how bad things are, policymakers, businesses and individuals can avoid making the situation worse with urgent action.
If you’ve followed climate news recently, the substance of the new IPCC report probably won’t come as much of a surprise. For years, alarming headlines have created a sort of drip of bad climate news, and in recent weeks, droughts, storms and fires have coalesced into one of the most cataclysmic seasons of climate-related extreme weather events in memory.
Even a few years ago, scientists were not entirely comfortable drawing the connection between such events and climate change. But thats been changing, and the IPCC’s endorsement of those connections gives the concept a gravity that only such a global body can provide.