Sign In or Create an Account.

By continuing, you agree to the Terms of Service and acknowledge our Privacy Policy

Climate

The 5 Quotes You Need to Know from the IPCC Report

It's not too late. Yet.

The United Nations.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images, IPCC

On Monday, the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released its 2023 synthesis report, which brings together eight years of research about the planet’s rising temperature. Described as a “final warning,” a “clarion call,” and a “how-to guide to defuse the climate time-bomb,” the report offers little in the way of new information, but much in terms of a statement on the certitude and urgency of the supporting science.

Here are five of the most important quotes from the report.

1. “Very high confidence.”

The IPCC report offers readers and policymakers “the stone-cold truth” about climate change, as “laid out in unassailable science by the world’s top climate experts,” Manish Bapna, the president and CEO of the Natural Resources Defense Council, said. That conviction is echoed in the report’s multiple “very high confidence” assessments. There is virtually no doubt, for example, that “climate change is a threat to human well-being and planetary health,” that those dangers increase "with every increment of global warming," or that the atmospheric concentrations of methane and nitrous oxide “were higher [in 2019] than at any time in at least 800,000 years." Also of assurance is the fact that climate change has caused “mass mortality events" — and that to protect against future losses to humans and ecosystems, "deep, rapid, and sustained" reduction of heat-trapping greenhouse gases is required.

Overall, the phrase “high confidence” — including the highest-level calibration of “very high confidence” — appears 118 times in the 26-page summary, The Washington Post reports. The jury isn't out on the science.

2. “There is a rapidly closing window of opportunity to secure a liveable and sustainable future for all.”

One of the report’s starkest “very high confidence” assessments is that time is rapidly running out. “There is a rapidly closing window of opportunity to secure a liveable and sustainable future for all,” the authors warn.

The window is closing so rapidly, in fact, that the 2023 synthesis report is “almost certain” to be the last IPCC assessment "while the world still has a chance of limiting global temperature rises to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels, the threshold beyond which our damage to the climate will rapidly become irreversible,” The Guardian writes.

That sense of a last chance can be felt throughout the report. Without "urgent, effective, and equitable” progress away from our current rate of greenhouse gas emissions, the threats to human life and health and global diversity and ecosystems will increase in the coming years, the report warns. By that same token, the positive actions we take now could have beneficial “impacts now and for thousands of years.”

3. “Without a strengthening of policies, global warming of 3.2°C is projected by 2100.”

While the policies and laws in place to combat climate change have expanded since the last IPCC report was published in 2014, the authors found we still have a long way to go. Alarmingly, the current nationally set targets of the Paris climate agreement for curbing greenhouse gas emissions aren't strong enough, and “make it likely” that we will “exceed 1.5°C during the 21st century,” which in turn will “make it harder to limit warming below 2°C.” Without more ambitious targets and stronger action by governments around the world, “global warming of 3.2°C is projected by 2100,” the report found.

The good news is, a number of strategies for lowering greenhouse gas emissions are cheaper than ever before, including solar energy, wind energy, ways to reduce food waste, and better-managed crop and grasslands.

4. “Every region in the world is projected to face further increases in climate hazards.”

No one is safe from the coming changes. "Every region in the world is projected to face further increases in climate hazards,” the report found.

Risks anticipated in the near-term future include heat deaths; food-, water-, and vector-borne diseases; “mental health challenges”; flooding; biodiversity loss; and decreased food production in some regions. Additionally, “current 1-in-100 year extreme sea level events” are expected to take place yearly in more than half of all studied tidal regions by 2100 — “under all considered scenarios” — due to the rising sea levels, the IPCC report found. Intensified tropical cyclones and hurricanes are also on their way.

These dangers will only “escalate with every increment of global warming,” the authors wrote. But the suffering won’t be felt equally around the globe: Some 3.3 to 3.6 billion people live in areas that leave them uniquely vulnerable to climate-related hazards. Oftentimes, such disproportionately-affected communities are ones that have historically contributed the least to climate change.

5. “Public and private finance flows for fossil fuels are still greater than those for climate adaptation and mitigation.”

If there was one overriding message in the IPCC, it’s that things need to change fast. Global warming is expected to continue to rise between now and 2040 due to increased cumulative CO2 emissions in “nearly all considered scenarios and modeled pathways,” the researchers found.

The only way to limit manmade warming is net zero CO2 emissions. What exactly does that involve? “A substantial reduction in overall fossil fuel use” is the big one — along with electrification, energy conservation, and other energy advances. While good progress has been made funneling money towards those sorts of projects, we have not turned the tide just yet, as “public and private finance flows for fossil fuels are still greater than those for climate adaptation and mitigation.”

But as the authors emphasized time and time again, how effectively and how soon we cut off our emissions will largely be what determines “whether warming can be limited to 1.5°C or 2°C.” Keeping the fossil fuel infrastructure we have now, without abatement, however, would doom us to enough CO2 emissions that we “exceed the remaining carbon budget for 1.5°C.”

You’re out of free articles.

Subscribe today to experience Heatmap’s expert analysis 
of climate change, clean energy, and sustainability.
To continue reading
Create a free account or sign in to unlock more free articles.
or
Please enter an email address
By continuing, you agree to the Terms of Service and acknowledge our Privacy Policy
Climate

AM Briefing: A Forecasting Crisis

On climate chaos, DOE updates, and Walmart’s emissions

We’re Gonna Need a Better Weather Model
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

Current conditions: Bosnia’s capital of Sarajevo is blanketed in a layer of toxic smog • Temperatures in Perth, in Western Australia, could hit 106 degrees Fahrenheit this weekend • It is cloudy in Washington, D.C., where lawmakers are scrambling to prevent a government shutdown.

THE TOP FIVE

1. NOAA might have to change its weather models

The weather has gotten so weird that the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is holding internal talks about how to adjust its models to produce more accurate forecasts, the Financial Timesreported. Current models are based on temperature swings observed over one part of the Pacific Ocean that have for years correlated consistently with specific weather phenomena across the globe, but climate change seems to be disrupting that cause and effect pattern, making it harder to predict things like La Niña and El Niño. Many forecasters had expected La Niña to appear by now and help cool things down, but that has yet to happen. “It’s concerning when this region we’ve studied and written all these papers on is not related to all the impacts you’d see with [La Niña],” NOAA’s Michelle L’Heureux told the FT. “That’s when you start going ‘uh-oh’ there may be an issue here we need to resolve.”

Keep reading...Show less
Yellow
Culture

2024 Was the Year the Climate Movie Grew Up

Whether you agree probably depends on how you define “climate movie” to begin with.

2024 movies.
Heatmap Illustration

Climate change is the greatest story of our time — but our time doesn’t seem to invent many great stories about climate change. Maybe it’s due to the enormity and urgency of the subject matter: Climate is “important,” and therefore conscripted to the humorless realms of journalism and documentary. Or maybe it’s because of a misunderstanding on the part of producers and storytellers, rooted in an outdated belief that climate change still needs to be explained to an audience, when in reality they don’t need convincing. Maybe there’s just not a great way to have a character mention climate change and not have it feel super cringe.

Whatever the reason, between 2016 and 2020, less than 3% of film and TV scripts used climate-related keywords during their runtime, according to an analysis by media researchers at the University of Southern California. (The situation isn’t as bad in literature, where cli-fi has been going strong since at least 2013.) At least on the surface, this on-screen avoidance of climate change continued in 2024. One of the biggest movies of the summer, Twisters, had an extreme weather angle sitting right there, but its director, Lee Isaac Chung, went out of his way to ensure the film didn’t have a climate change “message.”

Keep reading...Show less
Politics

Republicans Will Regret Killing Permitting Reform

They might not be worried now, but Democrats made the same mistake earlier this year.

Permitting reform's tombstone.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

Permitting reform is dead in the 118th Congress.

It died earlier this week, although you could be forgiven for missing it. On Tuesday, bipartisan talks among lawmakers fell apart over a bid to rewrite parts of the National Environmental Policy Act. The changes — pushed for by Representative Bruce Westerman, chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee — would have made it harder for outside groups to sue to block energy projects under NEPA, a 1970 law that governs the country’s process for environmental decisionmaking.

Keep reading...Show less
Green