Understorey: Climate Physics Code Red

The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has three working groups preparing reports in the leadup to COP26 in Glasgow in November.   Working Group I deals with the physical science basis of climate change, and has just released its contribution.  Their key message, that the world has failed in its bid to keep to 1.5 degrees warming by 2050, allows for a chance – just a chance – that we can bring it back to 1.5 degrees warming if we take low emissions seriously.   The UN Secretary-General António Guterres sums up the report bluntly as “code red for humanity” with the additional warning that “this report must sound a death knell for coal and fossil fuels, before they destroy our planet… Countries should also end all new fossil fuel exploration and production, and shift fossil fuel subsidies into renewable energy.  By 2030, solar and wind capacity should quadruple and renewable energy investments should triple to maintain a net zero trajectory by mid-century.”  Among others, we hear from Hoesung Lee, Chair of the IPCC, and Valérie Masson-Delmotte and Panmao Zhai, Co-Chairs of Working Group 1, and Inge Andersen, Executive Director of the UN Environment Programme.

Picture: Changing by the artist Alisa Singer.  “As we witness our planet transforming around us we watch, listen, measure … respond.” Supplied by IPCC.