The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) today approved and released the first of a series of four reports that will make up the Fifth Assessment Report (AR5). It warns of an alarming escalation of impacts – but also shows that preventing climate chaos is still possible.
The report highlights accelerating impacts of climate change that make a truly disturbing reading. In the past decade (2002-2011), the Greenland Ice Sheet melted at a rate six times faster, on average, than the decade before. Antarctic melting was five times faster. Since 1993 sea-levels have risen twice as fast as in the past century on average while the Arctic sea-ice has diminished significantly faster than projected.
The IPCC report underlines “unequivocal and unprecedented” warming of the climate system. Despite many interpretations from a ‘leaked’ copy of the report even claimed a pause in warming, the actual report clearly says that “each of the last three decades have been successively warmer at the Earth’s surface than any preceding decade since 1850.”
The report shows there is still a way out of this mess. The IPCC defines different scenarios, Representative Concentration Pathways, for our emissions and related impacts. The scenario that keeps warming below 2°C implies that fossil fuel emissions will need to stop growing before 2020 and reach zero by around 2070.
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