we are witnessing climate change unprecedented for 125,000 years, according to the IPCC

The experts of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) unveil, Monday, March 20, a synthesis which completes eight years of work and which achieves consensus in the scientific community.

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A hand protects from the sun.  (AURELIE LAGAIN / RADIO FRANCE)

For 35 years, the mission of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has been to enlighten decision-makers and citizens on the reality of climate change and to do this to regularly establish critical summaries of the thousands of scientific publications existing on the subject. This means that IPCC scientists who represent 195 countries, have an obligation to answer all questions, doubts, and comments sent to them by their colleagues around the world. And that each sentence written in the various reports is scrupulously weighed, and validated by the entire scientific community.

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The summary published on Monday March 20, 2023 summarizes the 10,000 pages of previous work. We can thus remember that our world is warmer, by 1.1°C compared to the beginning of the industrial era in 1850. Also to know: this is a climate change without precedent for 125,000 years and that there is no longer any scientific doubt that this climate change is the consequence of greenhouse gas emissions, due to human activities.

This warmer world is already causing more forest fires, heat waves, storms, lower agricultural yields and to limit the risk of irreversible damage, we should stay below 1.5°C or 2°C of warming. , by the end of the century, but that is not the trajectory we are on. Today we are rather heading towards a warming which could be 2.7°C by 2100.

We can be reasonable, if…

What gives hope is that there is also a scientific consensus on certain solutions to get out of it. It is still possible to mitigate this climate change by urgently adopting adapted policies. For example, in the agricultural world, by thinking about the place of livestock farming, which is a major emitter of greenhouse gases, or even by restoring forests, human areas or even by adapting energy choices, the architecture of cities, transport, etc.

There is another scientific certainty: the longer these measures to limit greenhouse gas emissions are delayed, the greater the effort to be made.


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