‘Widespread and Severe.’ The Climate Crisis is Here, But There’s Still Time to Limit the Damage
August 09, 2021 at 02:30PM “Widespread and severe”—that’s how climate scientists from around the world have described the impacts of climate change in a new United Nations report published today . The report’s findings further affirm warnings scientists like me have been sharing for decades. More than three decades ago, during a congressional hearing on a hot July 1988 afternoon in Washington, D.C., Dr. James E. Hansen told our elected officials that it was already possible to detect a warming of the planet due primarily to an increase in carbon dioxide concentrations from fossil fuel burning. Hansen was prescient. It would take the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) another seven years after that to conclude that there was a “ discernible human influence ” on our climate. The IPCC, like many scientific institutions, is intrinsically conservative. So, when they state that the impacts of climate change are now “widespread and severe,” it means th...