Jean-Pascal van Ypersele, former vice-chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, said: "An overemphasis on geoengineering to regulate global warming could put the planet on a riskier trajectory."
If the world were to warm more than 1.5°C compared to pre-industrial times, it would mean significantly more heat waves, extreme precipitation and drought than if it stayed below that threshold. Most of these impacts will leave irreversible marks on ecology and people, said Jean-Pascal van Ypersele, former vice-chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the world's largest collective of climate experts. An overemphasis on geoengineering to regulate global warming could put the planet on a higher-risk trajectory, he said in an email interview before the IPCC's summary report was released on Monday. Ypersele is a Belgian climatologist attending the IPCC meeting in Interlaken, Switzerland, which is running overtime.

The publication of the report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has been "delayed" by "the fight between rich and developing countries over emission targets and financial aid to vulnerable countries", reports the Associated Press. The final report of the IPCC's Sixth Assessment Cycle (AR6) is a synthesis that brings together the findings of the August 2021 Climate Science Report, the February 2022 Climate Impacts Report and the April 2022 How to Address Climate Change Report, as well as previous "special reports". The summary report was supposed to be approved on Friday after a week-long approval meeting of the governments, reports the AP agency. The report said: "The deadline was repeatedly extended as representatives of major countries such as China, Brazil, Saudi Arabia, as well as the US and the European Union, argued over the weekend over the wording of key phrases in the text... An unusual process for countries to sign a scientific report, is to ensure that governments accept its conclusions as an authoritative recommendation on which to base their actions." According to Carbon Brief magazine, the report was approved on Sunday evening and is to be published today at 1:00 p.m. CET. (A detailed overview of the AR6 summary report will be published by Carbon Brief later this week). Politico reports that the delay in the release of the report is related to a "strike" by some scientists. Ahead of the report, the Guardian speaks to Samoa's prime minister, who calls on the world to take action. Fiame Naomi Mata'afa tells the Guardian: “We are all affected, but the degree of impact depends on the specific circumstances of the countries. So our low-lying atoll countries, it's right there, we live with it.” The Guardian also provides an explanation of what the AR6 summary report is and why it's important.

In August 2021, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) published its long-awaited report on the "physical science basis" of climate change. The report concluded that climate change is "unequivocally" human-caused and is already affecting all regions of our planet. These findings were reported worldwide, attracting international attention. The mammoth 2,500-page document compiles a vast body of peer-reviewed literature and provides the most up-to-date summary of climate science ever published. Every statement in the report is supported by authoritative sources.

In total, the report boasts an incredible 13,500 citations.

Our analysis examines which citations were included in the report and reveals a surprisingly wide and diverse range of topics. However, it also shows that the report is significantly dominated by citations from the countries of the Global North and are commonly found behind the payment gateway. We found that 99.95 % of cited references were written in English, and three-quarters of all literature cited in the report had at least one author based in the US or UK.

When and where? The IPCC's report on climate science – known as the Working Group I (WG1) report – is the first part of a three-part Sixth Assessment Report (AR6). Hundreds of scientists spent years reviewing the existing literature on climate change to produce this report, which will form the cornerstone of climate science for years to come. This report was followed by two more parts on impacts, adaptation and vulnerability due to climate change and climate change mitigation, which were issued in February and in March 2022. AR6 will be concluded with a summary report to be published next week. The AR6 WG1 report is an update of the Fifth Assessment Cycle (AR5) WG1 report that was published in 2013. The authors of the new report were asked to focus on providing an update since the last cycle, explaining progress in climate science, how the credibility of the findings has changed or strengthened and what new themes have emerged since AR5.

We found that 98.5 % citations in the AR6 WG1 report were published since 2000, and 85 % of those were published after AR5 was released in 2013. The following chart shows how many citations were published each year from 2000-21.

Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)

dr. Sarah Connors and Felix Chavelli, Carbon Brief

Since its establishment in 1988, the IPCC has published six sets of "Assessment Reports". These documents summarize the latest scientific evidence on human-induced climate change and are considered the most authoritative reports on the subject. The IPCC has also produced a series of "special reports" focusing on specific areas of climate change. Carbon Brief analyzed the authors of all six sets of assessment reports, as well as the last five special reports. The data show that women and experts from the Global South have gained greater representation in IPCC reports over time, but are still underrepresented compared to their male and Global North counterparts.

The first IPCC assessment report, published in 1990, had approximately 100 authors. The analysis shows that less than 10 % of these authors were women and less than 20 % came from institutions in the Global South. Not a single woman contributed to the first assessment report of Working Group I on climate science. In contrast, the latest evaluation cycle, whose summary report will be published next week, has a total of more than 700 authors, of which more than 30 %s are women and more than 40 %s are from countries in the Global South. Carbon Brief spoke to a wide range of IPCC authors and experts about their experiences at the organization. Many experts emphasize the time-consuming nature of their work at the IPCC, describing the work as "intense", "stressful" and "unsustainable".

Experts also highlight obstacles they have encountered or seen during their time at the IPCC – including language, gender discrimination, funding issues and cultural barriers. "Strong, dominant, often male voices tend to prevail," the IPCC co-chair tells Carbon Brief. "Unconscious biases are there even when you pick the brightest scientists," another co-chair tells Carbon Brief. But they also tell Carbon Brief about the improvement in diversity and awareness over the past three decades.

The head of the IPCC's Gender Action Team talks to Carbon Brief about progress on gender equality, while members of the IPCC Bureau explain how they take diversity into account when selecting the authors of their reports. In what follows, Carbon Brief summarizes its findings through a series of graphs and maps. It also examines how the IPCC's approach to diversity has evolved since the organization's inception in 1988.

The IPCC was established jointly by the United Nations Environment Program and the World Meteorological Organization in 1988. The purpose of the IPCC is to evaluate information in the scientific and technical literature related to all significant components of the climate change issue. The IPCC draws on hundreds of the world's expert scientists as authors and thousands as peer reviewers. Leading experts on climate change and environmental, social and economic sciences from around 60 countries have helped the IPCC prepare regular assessments of the scientific evidence for understanding global climate change and its consequences. Thanks to its ability to report on climate change, its consequences and the feasibility of adaptation and mitigation measures, the IPCC is considered the official advisory body for the entire world. government on the state of science on climate change. For example, the IPCC organized the development of internationally accepted methods for conducting national inventories of greenhouse gas emissions.