Elizabeth Kolbert reads through the new Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report:
The I.P.C.C. doesn’t conduct any research of its own—its conclusions are based entirely on already-published scientific papers—so it could be argued that there was no real news in the latest document. The force of the report comes simply from assembling all the data in one place; the summary reads like a laundry list of the apocalypse—flood, drought, disease, starvation. Climate change, the group noted, will reduce yields of major crops by up to two per cent each decade for the remainder of this century. (One of the reasons for this is that heat waves, which will become more common as the world warms, depress the yields of staple crops like corn.)
Since the global population is projected to grow throughout the century—to eight billion by 2025, nine billion by 2050, and almost eleven billion by 2100—this is obviously rather bad news.
John Upton explains what the IPCC report means for the US:
For North America, the report states there is “high confidence” of links between climate change and rising temperatures, ravaging downpours, and declining water supplies. Even if temperatures are allowed to rise by just 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit (2 C), which is the goal of current international climate negotiations (a goal that won’t be met unless everybody gets a lot more serious about curbing greenhouse gas pollution), such severe weather is going to get a lot worse. North America’s coastal regions will continue to face a particularly long list of hazards, with climate change bringing growing risks of “sea-level rise, warming, ocean acidification, extratropical cyclones, altered upwelling, and hurricanes and other storms.”
Brian Merchant notes the technological solutions the IPCC report endorses:
Judging by the choices listed, the scientists believe we’re primarily going to need technologies to make our resource use more efficient; to squeeze every drop out of our dwindling water supplies and increasingly stressed crops. About half of the recommended technologies fall into that category, which makes sense: drought and heat waves are on the rise, as are global population trends. Nourishing 10 billion people with rampant dry spells and desertification will be no easy task. So, better water reclamation technology will likely prove important; reverse osmosis processes, for instance, have improved to the point where it can transform wastewater into clean drinking water. It’s the stigma of drinking sewage water that needs be removed, mostly, and to scale up adoption.
Food and water will have to be stored longer, too, and science is tackling some interesting new preservation methods that may come in handy—using pressurization to kill harmful bacteria, for one.
Uri Friedman and Svati Kirsten Narula want to stop waiting for an international response:
[P]reparing for the worst actually presents major opportunities for the private sector and local governments. In its report this week, the IPCC is indeed calling for action—but not in the form of grand international declarations or promises. “Among the many actors and roles associated with successful adaptation, the evidence increasingly suggests two to be critical to progress; namely those associated with local government and those with the private sector,” the report states. The implicit message: Citizens should stop waiting for world leaders to legislate climate change away—because that can’t be done. Instead, individuals and communities need to show entrepreneurial initiative and figure out how best to survive in an increasingly volatile climate.
But what exactly does “adaptation” look like in practice? Americans have long practiced climate-change adaptation—by, for instance, commissioning public art to make hurricane-evacuation routes more visible, systematically planting trees to combat urban heat, and genetically engineering drought-tolerant crops. In many of these cases, people aren’t even aware that they’re “adapting” to climate change; they’re just doing what needs to be done to keep the water flowing or the business growing.
Additionally, Climate Central collects harrowing charts from the report, while Climate Progress shames conservative news outlets for downplaying the IPCC’s findings.
The Dish 