Climbing temperatures, more intense heat waves, prolonged droughts and more heavy rains due to a changed water cycle: through greenhouse-gas emissions, human beings have set in motion serious and far-reaching climate changes in every corner of the world, as the IPCC’s Working Group I explains in its sixth Assessment Report, released today.
The new report summarises the current state of knowledge regarding how the Earth’s climate system works, and describes both observed and projected changes within that system. In comparison to its predecessors, the new Assessment Report’s findings are based on significantly improved weather and climate observations from the past and present; on simulations run with new global climate models, and on new analytical methods that combine highly diverse types of data.
In this way, the authors from Working Group I, part of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), have succeeded in improving our understanding of anthropogenic influences by drawing on a growing number of climate variables, and in showing in detail the extent to which humans are responsible for extreme weather events and climatic developments.
“I consider it major progress that the authors from Working Group I can now say how likely it is that individual events like the severe wildfires in Australia or the heat wave in western North America are the product of climate change,” says Prof Hans-Otto Pörtner, a climate researcher at the AWI and Co-Chair of the IPCC’s Working Group II, in an interview. After all, the climate debate no longer focuses solely on the rise in mean global temperature, but also and especially on extreme events and how they’re changing in comparison to the past.
“In the past few weeks, people living in southern and western Germany had to experience first-hand and tragically the unimaginable scale that extreme weather events can now assume, and the devastation they entail. Yet another reason why the statements made in the new IPCC Assessment Report should be understood as a final warning. We no longer have a choice. We as a society have to do everything within our power to stop global warming and prepare as best we can for risks and hazards that are now unavoidable,” says AWI Director Prof Antje Boetius with regard to the report unveiled today.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is an institution belonging to the United Nations. On behalf of the IPCC, experts from around the globe regularly compile the latest findings on climate change and assess them from a scientific standpoint. The 6th Assessment Report consists of eight publications:
Marcel Nicolaus
+49(471)4831-2905
marcel.nicolaus@awi.de
Hans-Otto Pörtner
hans.poertner@awi.de
Folke Mehrtens
+49(471)4831-2007
folke.mehrtens@awi.de