Climate cHnaGe

The planet is on track to see a climate it hasn’t seen in thousands of years—if not hundreds of thousands. Climate impacts are no longer matters of the future; they’re happening now.

This is the dose of reality offered in the latest assessment report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the leading governmental climate organization within the U.N. that represents some 195 countries and their scientific communities. “Every region across the globe” is feeling those effects now, per the report.

The report itself outlines where we already are in terms of warming: 1.07 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. Scientists have been sounding the alarm for years that our emissions are already influencing weather patterns. We only need to look to the last year to see how the climate crisis is unfolding: wildfires out West, heat waves up north, and hurricanes down the South. Elsewhere, fires, floods, and droughts have ravaged communities across continents.

The level of catastrophe to come all depends on public and private leaders and their ability to not only cut emissions—but to keep carbon in the ground. As we shift toward clean energy, we must also protect our natural carbon sinks to prevent any more greenhouse gases from leaking into the atmosphere. The IPCC found a 66 to 100% likelihood that anthropogenic behavior is to blame depending on what section you’re looking at. That’s not a lot of room to be wrong.

“The reality is that this is no longer about future projections,” said Rachel Cleetus, policy director of the Union of Concerned Scientists’ Climate and Energy Program who wasn’t involved in the report. “This is about here and now.”