While the topic of climate change is pressing and extensively deliberated on, few are aware of how dire the consequences we face are. Several organizations and individuals work towards raising awareness about this issue, and the IPCC is one of the frontrunners.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is the United Nations committee directed towards climate change, comprising 195 members, which assesses the nature of climate change, its impact on the future, and plausible mitigation methods. Currently, in its sixth assessment cycle, the IPCC releases a series of reports every 6 to 7 years outlining their research and evaluation on the status of our planet, the first of which was published recently on August 9, 2021.
This cycle’s first working group (WGI) report, Climate Change 2021: The Physical Science Basis, emphasizes the unequivocal increase in global temperature caused by human activities. “There is no uncertainty language in this sentence because there is no uncertainty that global warming is caused by human activity and the burning of fossil fuels,” said Friederike Otto, an IPCC co-author.
One of the major takeaways from the report is that we will overshoot the 2C mark by 2100, as CO2 emissions are at an all-time high of approximately 410 ppm (parts per million), higher than any concentration in almost two million years as of 2019. However, scientists state that with a conscious effort towards living sustainably and having a ‘carbon budget’ (which should eventually lead to net-zero emissions), we might be able to undo the damage in only a couple of decades. The same, however, could not be said about rising sea levels. With the frightening possibility of ice-free arctic summers looming above us, the damage the increasing sea level has caused would take centuries to reverse.
One of the possible solutions the IPCC report mentions is an upcoming research area called carbon sequestration: the process where carbon dioxide is removed from the atmosphere and put elsewhere. While this is a viable solution, only small-scale studies have been carried out, and the technology is still incomplete, making several scientists skeptical.
Climate change is a global fight that we cannot afford to lose, and it is our collective responsibility to do everything in our power to stop it. Spreading awareness about its consequences and mitigation methods is only step one; we must all start implementing these solutions now and leap to step two together.
