The signs are all around us, temperatures are rising, snow and rainfall patterns are shifting and more extreme climate events such as heavy storms and record high temperatures are occuring more and more often. Climate change is finally being discussed in mainstream media, new series and movies are focusing our attention on the seriousness of the problem and in the last few years there has been an increase in the number of published books accessible to the public such as The Uninhabitable Earth , Under a White Sky and How to Avoid a Climate Disaster.
Climate change is rated in the top three of every reputable list of critical problems the world faces today. Many other top-ranked problems such as food security, safety and wellbeing, and poverty are also linked to climate change in some way. In the last few years an enormous amount of research on climate change has been done in various fields for example linguistics, environmentalism, medicine, political science and more, but somehow it remains difficult to fully comprehend the impact of climate change on our futures and be spurred to action.
The amount of information available on climate change is immense. In the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) the words climate change occurs 22 695 times, and the technical jargon associated with climate change further complicates the plethora of information (and misinformation) we encounter on a daily basis.
The United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (The IPCC), created in 1988, can be seen in some way as bridging the gap between available scientific information and mainstream media, by providing an open and transparent view of the drivers and risks of climate change from a scientific perspective, reflecting a diverse range of views and expertise around the world. The IPCC has been the internationally accepted authority on climate change for many years. In consensus with 120 governments, it consolidates information from leading climate scientists by identifying agreements in the scientific community and provides scientific reports relevant to our understanding of the risk of anthropogenic (human-induced) climate change. The panel does not conduct its own research into the science surrounding climate change enabling it to provide objective reports.
One of the frequently mentioned documents that people quote when talking about climate change is the IPCC report. The IPCC's Fifth Assessment Report was the critical scientific input to the Paris agreement in 2015. The IPCC synthesis report is due for release in late 2022 - 2023. The Decoding the IPCC Report will be right there to bring you a series of posts focused on decoding the IPCC report so that it is accessible for anyone and everyone. It doesn't matter where in the world you are, climate change is real. We need to better our understanding so that we can work together on the solutions to shape a better world for ourselves and future generations.
