: ‘Widespread and Severe.’ The Climate Crisis Is Here, But There’s Still Time to Limit the Damage #WorldNEWS “Widespread and severe”—that’s how climate scientists from around

‘Widespread and Severe.’ The Climate Crisis Is Here, But There’s Still Time to Limit the Damage #WorldNEWS
“Widespread and severe”—that’s how climate scientists from around the world have described the impacts of climate change in a new United Nations report published today. The report’s findings further affirm warnings scientists like me have been sharing for decades. More than three decades ago, during a congressional hearing on a hot July 1988 afternoon in Washington, D. C. , Dr. James E. Hansen told our elected officials that it was already possible to detect a warming of the planet due primarily to an increase in carbon dioxide concentrations from fossil fuel burning.
Hansen was prescient. It would take the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) another seven years after that to conclude that there was a “discernible human influence” on our climate. The IPCC, like many scientific institutions, is intrinsically conservative. So, when they state that the impacts of climate change are now “widespread and severe,” it means that the impacts of climate change are now widespread and severe. Of course, you don’t need a scientific report to tell you that at this point. You need simply watch the unprecedented extreme weather disasters we’ve witnessed this summer play out in real time on our television screens and in our newspaper headlines.
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With the release of the new Sixth Assessment report (“AR6”) on the science underlying the climate crisis, the news is not good. In addition to the finding that climate impacts are widespread and severe, the report shows that many severe impacts are locked in for the future.
Two decades ago, the so-called “hockey stick” curve, published by my co-authors and me in 1999, was featured in the all-important “summary for policy makers” (or “SPM”) of the 2001 Third IPCC Assessment report. The curve, which depicts temperature variations over the past 1,000 years based on “proxy” records such as tree rings, corals, and ice cores, showed the upward spiking of modern temperatures (the “blade”) as it dramatically ascends, during the industrial era, upward from the “handle” that describes the modest, slightly downward steady trend that preceded it. datawrapper. dwcdn. net/j58gE/1/
Featured in the AR6 SPM now is an even longer hockey stick with an even sharper blade. datawrapper. dwcdn. net/UmLkR/1/
The new report also suggests that the recent warming is not only unprecedented over the past two millennia, but possibly, the past hundred millennia—let that sink in. As the IPCC report lays bare, we are engaged in a truly unprecedented and fundamentally dangerous experiment with the one planet we know that can support us and all other known life.