This has been an unusual summer for many parts of the world. High temperatures and droughts have affected most of the American west. There were widespread fires that burnt significant acreage in California, Oregon and Washington states. Fires also burnt the forests on Canada’s border with the United States. The smoke produced by the fires was visible in cities as far south as Washington, the American capital. There were also fires in Siberia. Heavy rains in India’s western states resulted in floods. Heavy rains also affected Pakistan.
This has now become a regular feature of the weather pattern in Pakistan. This time around there were property damage and deaths in Chakwal, a city southeast of Pakistan. Heavy rains in the hills that overlook the city brought landslides that destroyed many houses and killed scores of people. There were also heavy rains in central China which caused destructive floods. The ice shield in Antarctica began to melt at a faster rate than had been expected.
The reason why these and other weather events were occurring was provided by the latest report issued by a high-powered panel of scientists that has been keeping a watch on the way global weather is changing. The body, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), issued its latest report on August 9, 2021, describing how human action had altered global environment at an “unprecedented pace”. But first a few words about the panel, its creation, and the work it does.
The IPCC is an intergovernmental body of the United Nations that was set up in 1988 “to provide governments at all levels with scientific information that they can use to develop climate policies”. The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) set up the IPCC and headquartered it in Geneva, the Swiss city that was the home for several other international bodies. The IPCC informs governments about the state of knowledge of climate change. It does this by examining all the relevant scientific literature about climate change. It also covers possible response options available to the policymakers in the most affected countries.
The organisation does not conduct its own research. Thousands of scientists and other experts volunteer to review the IPCC publications. They compile key findings into “Assessment Reports” for policymakers and the general public. Leading climate scientists and all member governments endorse the IPCC’s findings. The IPCC reports play a key role in the annual climate negotiations held by the noted United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).
The IPCC Fifth Assessment Report was an important influence on the landmark Paris Agreement signed by member governments in 2015. The IPCC shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with then US Vice President Al Gore for contributions to the understanding of climate change. In August 2021, the IPCC published its Working Group contribution to the Sixth Assessment Report on the physical science basis of ciliate change. The panel provided detailed account of how catastrophic consequences lie ahead unless nations around the globe rapidly and dramatically cut greenhouse gas emissions. Urgent action was needed, said the IPCC. British newspaper The Guardian described the report as the “starkest warning yet major inevitable and irreversible climate changes”.
The panel included a number of historians who looked at deep past to see how climate has already affected the Earth and the people who live on the planet. Each of the past four decades has been successively warmer than the one that came before it, dating back to 1850. Mankind has warmed the climate at a rate without parallel since before the fall of the Roman Empire. According to the panel’s historians, to find a time when the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere changed this fast and this much, we will need to go back 66 million years. That was the time dinosaurs walked the Earth. Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has risen to levels not experienced in 2 million years.
If action was not taken, the situation would worsen quickly. “The chances of unknown unknowns become increasingly large,” said Zeke Hausfather, director of climate and energy at the Breakthrough Institute and a member of the United Nations Panel. “We don’t have any great comparable analogues in the last 2 million years or so. It is hard for us to predict exactly what will happen to the Earth’s systems.” The evidence for mankind’s influence on the climate system, “once a fiercely debated topic, is now overwhelming,” the report says. What started as a scientific hypothesis has become “established fact”. The report’s 42-page “summary for policymakers” uses the phrase “virtually certain” nearly a dozen times. The words “high confidence” are repeated more than a hundred times.
The rate of sea-level rise, the retreat of ice sheets and glaciers, and the acidity of the oceans are all described as “unprecedented in the past several thousand years”. Even the certainty with which the panelists presented their findings has not caused the skeptics in the world of policymaking to stop resisting action. The effort by President Joe Biden did not persuade the Republican opposition to accept his climate agenda. Donald Trump, the Republican president who succeeded Biden and moved to the White House on January 20, 2025 showed no interest in taking action to address the causes of climate change.
Thirty years ago, the same panel had warned that mankind was causing a dangerous greenhouse effect and that if collective action was not taken to slow Earth’s warming, there could be “profound consequences” for people and nature alike. The latest report was compiled by 234 scientists who used 14,000 studies from around the globe to arrive at their findings. The report was released less than three months before the climate summit scheduled for November which was held in Scotland. The United Nations Secretary General called the report’s conclusions “a code red for humanity” and said nations needed to find ways to limit global warming as much as possible.
The report took serious issue with the position taken by President Trump and his political associates who dismissed global warming as a Chinese hoax perpetrated to set back American economic growth. It states that there is no remaining scientific doubt that human action was fueling climate change. That much is unequivocal. The only remaining uncertainty was that the world could gather the will to prevent darker times.
