2021 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming Digest #02

Story of the Week... Toon of the Week... Coming Soon on SkS... Poster of the Week... SkS Week in Review... 

Story of the Week...

Coming attraction: IPCC's upcoming major climate assessment

Look for more emphasis on 'solutions,' efforts by cities, climate equity ... and outlook for emissions cuts in a hoped-for global economic recovery from pandemic. 

 John Kerry Signs Climate Agreement

John Kerry – then U.S. Secretary of State, and now set to be the U.S. Special Presidential Envoy for Climate – signs the Paris Agreement on Climate Change on April 22, 2016, at UN headquarters, with his granddaughter in tow. The upcoming IPCC Sixth Assessment Report will be released ahead of the 2023 deadline for nations to update the emission cuts they pledged under the agreement. (Photo credit: United Nations / Flickr

Despite the speed bump posed by the COVID-19 pandemic, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is rolling toward completion of its Sixth Assessment Report, the latest in a series that began in 1990.

IPCC’s assessments, produced by many hundreds of scientists volunteering countless hours, have long been the world’s most definitive statements on human-induced climate change from fossil fuel use. Rather than carrying out its own research, the IPCC crafts its consensus assessment reports based on the vast array of peer-reviewed work in science journals. The draft reports are scrutinized by experts and officials in UN-member governments before they become final.

It’s too soon to know exactly what the authors will conclude in the Sixth Assessment Report (AR6), to be released in 2021-22, but the chapter outlines suggest a more interwoven look at how society is affected by, and responds to, the climate crisis.

The report could also end up tipping its hat toward a narrowing range of potential outcomes, as reflected in recent key papers and greenhouse-gas emission trends. If the most dire scenarios of past reports are a bit less likely than it seemed a decade ago, some of the tamer scenarios also might be increasingly out of reach.

Nations will draw on the new assessment as they prepare to revise their emission goals in the Paris Agreement’s first five-year stocktake, set for 2023.

Click here to access the entire article as originally posted on the Yale Climate Connections website.

Coming attraction: IPCC's upcoming major climate assessment by Bob Henson, Article, Yale Climate Connections, Jan 6, 2021


Toon of the Week...

2921 Toon 2 

Hat tip to the Stop Climate Science Denial Facebook page.


Coming Soon on SkS...


Poster of the Week...

2021 Poster 2

Andrew Emory Dessler is a climate scientist and Professor of Atmospheric Sciences at Texas A&M University. His research subject areas are atmospheric chemistry, climate change and climate change policy. Wikipedia 

SkS Week in Review... 

Posted by John Hartz on Sunday, 10 January, 2021


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