Both the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) and the National Climate Assessment’s (NCA) reports provide continual corrections to our understanding of Climate Change. Our quickly warming planet is undergoing vast changes that would be harder to ‘see’ if we didn’t have reports like these:

  • FOURTH NATIONAL CLIMATE ASSESSMENT Volume II: Impacts, Risks, and Adaptation in the United States The National Climate Assessment (NCA) assesses the science of climate change and variability and its impacts across the United States, now and throughout this century. "Earth’s climate is now changing faster than at any point in the history of modern civilization, primarily as a result of human activities. The impacts of global climate change are already being felt in the United States and are projected to intensify in the future—but the severity of future impacts will depend largely on actions taken to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and to adapt to the changes that will occur. Americans increasingly recognize the risks climate change poses to their everyday lives and livelihoods and are beginning to respond (Figure 1.1).  " (November 2018, FOURTH NATIONAL CLIMATE ASSESSMENT)
  • Global Warming of 1.5 °C an IPCC special report on the impacts of global warming of 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels and related global greenhouse gas emission pathways, in the context of strengthening the global response to the threat of climate change, sustainable development, and efforts to eradicate poverty (October 8, 2018) Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)


There are other climate reports, of course, around the world and focusing on various sectors, but few get the attention these two get. And, I suspect if the public was going to read a climate report, it would most likely be one of these two.

The impacts of Climate Change as our world quickly warms constantly alters our environment, our ability to adapt, and our choices. Both reports above provide more clarity about this manmade phenomenon so our choices in the future stay in sync with what is actually going on as we go further into Climate Change. This is important because what might have worked ten or twenty years ago may not be very effective on a scale and timeframe that will matter now.

These major reports coming at regular intervals give us the kind of feedback about the complexities of Climate Change with more objectivity than most of our other information sources. Scientists—not politicians and the media—take the lead in giving the public the most up-to-date, accurate model of reality from which we can plan. (Which is not to say that these reports haven’t been shaped by non-scientific hands also.)

One of the issues the NCA Vol. II focuses on is “Critical Infrastructure Service Disruption”, in other words, the importance of keeping our infrastructures intact as more flooding and heat come our way.

 “In order to make Northeast systems resilient to the kind of extreme climate-related disruptions the region has experienced recently—and the sort of disruptions projected for the future—would require significant new investments in infrastructure. For example, in Pennsylvania, bridges are expected to be more prone to damage during extreme weather events, because the state leads the country in the highest percentage of structurally deficient bridges.” (Critical Infrastructure Service Disruption, Chapter 8 Northeast, FOURTH NATIONAL CLIMATE ASSESSMENT Volume II: Impacts, Risks, and Adaptation in the United States)

Pennsylvania’s bridges may be in poor conditions, but New York State’s bridges are probably not much better. We still cannot adequately fund the regular maintenance of our bridges build decades ago, let alone marshaling our collective will to fund for the future. So when these reports say that we’ve already done much to address Climate Change that may be more hopeful rhetoric than is warranted. After all, it’s getting hotter.

These reports don’t cover everything about Climate Change. They don’t cover how pollution, loss of biodiversity and bio-mass, occurring in parallel and because of Climate Change can profoundly alter our life-support system—as this incredibly comprehensive and insightful article on insect loss does in the New York Times.

The Insect Apocalypse Is Here What does it mean for the rest of life on Earth? We’ve named and described a million species of insects, a stupefying array of thrips and firebrats and antlions and caddis flies and froghoppers and other enormous families of bugs that most of us can’t even name. (Technically, the word “bug” applies only to the order Hemiptera, also known as true bugs, species that have tubelike mouths for piercing and sucking — and there are as many as 80,000 named varieties of those.) The ones we think we do know well, we don’t: There are 12,000 types of ants, nearly 20,000 varieties of bees, almost 400,000 species of beetles, so many that the geneticist J.B.S. Haldane reportedly quipped that God must have an inordinate fondness for them. A bit of healthy soil a foot square and two inches deep might easily be home to 200 unique species of mites, each, presumably, with a subtly different job to do. And yet entomologists estimate that all this amazing, absurd and understudied variety represents perhaps only 20 percent of the actual diversity of insects on our planet — that there are millions and millions of species that are entirely unknown to science. (November 27, 2018) The New York Times [more on Wildlife and Climate Change in our area]

While we are warming up the place, we are losing a healthy, robust, and resilient environment that might have alleviated the worst of crop failures the spread of infectious diseases.

And these reports don’t cover what may now be our biggest hurdle in addressing Climate Change: How our dysfunctional politics and the dismal shift worldwide towards nationalism threatens humanity’s ability to address Climate Change collectively.

These reports also demonstrate the urgency that we shift away from the use of fossil fuels immediately.

 Another more recently released UN report makes the case against fossil fuels more starkly.

 It's Not Just America: Climate Policies Are Stumbling Worldwide According to the UN, most major polluters are not on track to meet their Paris goals. But critics say that accounting may be too pessimistic. Humanity is losing ground in its battle against climate change. On Tuesday, a new UN report warned that the world is farther than it was last year from meeting the goals of the Paris Agreement on climate change. More than half of the planet’s richest countries—including Canada, Australia, South Korea, the United States, and the nations of the European Union—are not cutting their carbon pollution as fast as they promised under that treaty, it says. If humanity does not change course, then Earth could warm by roughly 6 degrees Fahrenheit by the end of the century, the report suggests. This is enough warming to set off some of the most feared consequences of climate change, including deadly heat waves, ravaging wildfires, widespread plant and animal extinctions, and potentially many feet of runaway sea-level rise. (November 27, 2018) The Atlantic [more on Climate Change in our area]

The next reports coming out of the IPCC and the NCA are likely to be more dire because of the heat we’ve already baked into our climate system. But hopefully, they’ll also include real hope based on dramatic increases in humanity’s ability to address this crisis resulting in a dramatic decrease in greenhouse gas emissions.


Time passes.