Health Trotter

August 09, 2021 at 06:33PM Three years ago the United Nations climate science body issued a landmark report warning that the planet was on track to blow past efforts to limit global warming to 1.5°C above preindustrial levels, a threshold that it warned would bring catastrophic and irreversible effects of climate change. But in that same report, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) emphasized that many paths remained open for us to limit that damage—so long as we acted immediately. On Monday, the IPCC published a new document with a far less optimistic frame. In it, the group says that the pathway to limit warming to the 1.5°C mark has narrowed and lays out only one plausible scenario to meet that goal—one that would require an extraordinary level of action, and even then, would offer no guarantee. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] “It is still possible to forestall many of the most dire impacts,” says Ko Barrett, a vice chair of the IPCC, and deputy assist...

August 09, 2021 at 04:30PM As heat waves, hurricanes and other extreme weather events around the world hit harder and more often in recent years, scientists have become more confident than ever before in placing the blame unequivocally on human-made climate change. That shift was reflected in a starkly updated section of the latest version of the International Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) Assessment Report , published Aug. 9, which compiles years of climate science into what is widely considered the definitive document outlining the current state of knowledge on the atmospheric changes happening around us, and what the future may hold. The overall message of the new report—the sixth iteration of the document—was worrying, describing large average global temperature rises in recent decades and a shrinking window to reduce emissions and avert worst-scenario outcomes. But the scientists’ increased confidence in linking current extreme weather to climate change may be a notab...

August 09, 2021 at 04:30PM It’s been 52 years since the artist Jeff Gates made a reservation to go to the Moon. Like many who gathered around their TV sets to watch the first lunar landing on July 20, 1969, Gates—then a 20-year-old college student home for summer vacation—walked outside immediately afterward and looked skyward. “I kept saying, ‘there are human beings on that Moon!,’ says Gates, now 72. “It was unbelievable, and I wasn’t quite sure what to do with that feeling. But I wanted to be a part of that shared moment of exhilaration and amazement … It’s just human nature to want to be part of that.” [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] Gates, a longtime reader of sci-fi and fantasy books, had seen some media coverage of Pan Am’s First Moon Flights Club, a marketing stunt from the now-defunct airline offering lunar passage by the year 2000. He called an agent at the airline and made a reservation for himself and “Mrs. Gates,” the wife he assumed he would have by then. His...

August 09, 2021 at 03:30PM In so many ways, not much has changed since the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)—perhaps the premiere climate science-and-policy organization in the world—published its last major report in 2014. Just as it was seven years ago, the latest edition, published on Aug. 8, is largely gloomy in outlook, with grim warnings of what the future looks like given the self-destructive trajectory to which humanity seems to have committed itself. However, there are some subtle differences that, on deeper investigation, are truly incredible, indicating just how far down the nightmarish path we actually are. In each of the IPCC’s six Assessment Reports, the group has compiled a “summary for policymakers,” in which its findings are distilled down to what it most wants to communicate to those occupying seats of power around the world. The language choices, therefore, are no accident. Indeed, the 42-page document that comprises the 2021 ...

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...