Why the new IPCC report is so important

talk about it. Actually, let's start with the basics. What is the IPCC and what are these reports it producers. The IPCC was created under the United Nations and it was mandated as a body made up of scientists to produce regular reports that will tell the world about the state of our understanding of climate change. As these reports have come every seven years or so, our understanding has improved,

has become firmer. We know better than ever what causes climate change, what kind of impacts climate change is going to have at a very granular level, and what we need to do to address this problem so that we can minimize the impacts and even adapt to the warming that has already occurred. As a result, these reports have gotten longer and longer and longer. Right in today's report is the culmination of the sixth Sense of Reports. It's called the Synthesis Report, and it's built upon this wealth

of knowledge that you're talking about. How much scientific knowledge has gone into this report. Well, today's report is only thirty seven pages long, but that's because it's a summary of the entire sixth Assessment Report, which is about ten thousand pages long. That in itself is based on nearly

fifty thousand scientific studies. So one way to think about what the IPCC does is it creates the most established and rigorously fact checked body of knowledge that exists on climate change, and it gets signed off at least the summary, by every country on the planet. So today's report, every country has come together, looked at it, read it over. Their delegates have gone through the details and said, okay, we agree, we understand, and we're happy to publish this

with our names on it. Indeed, and that is unique in the history of modern science, going hundreds of years back. There is no other topic or science that countries of the world come together and approve that this is what is happening to the world, and this is what we must do to address the problems. Aside from being unique, why is this report actually important? What kind of real world impacts did these reports have? These are reports of such length and depth that they play a role in

all kinds of things, big and small. One clear example is an IPCC report that was published in twenty eighteen. It was a report, again commissioned by the United Nations after the Paris Agreement was signed, that asked scientists to tell the world what needs to be done to keep global warming below one point five degree celsius, which is one of the two goals in the Paris Agreement. And

what did it say? It is a bit academic, I'll give you that, but to paraphrase, it basically said that if the world is to keep global warming below one point five degree celsius, it needs to reach net zero carbon dioxide emissions by twenty fifty And that has become a rallying cry where every major economy has now set a net zero target, and every major corporation is working towards a net zero target, and it's an everyday use to the extent where of course, this climate podcast is

named after that very important sentence published in an IPCC report. So today's report. What are the key takeaways? The biggest takeaway is a blunt message, which is that burning fossil fuels without trapping its emissions is threatening human well being and the stability of much of life on Earth. And the scale of the problem is massive. Already, ACC says that three billion people are highly vulnerable to climate impacts. That's nearly half the population of the planet, and that's

just at one point one degree celsius. However, it's not just the dire stuff that these IPCC reports point out. They also say that there is a real chance to try and tackle this problem. Michaelleague Eric Croston says to be able to solve climate change, we need a million miracles, but the fact is over the past decade we've got at least a few thousand. All kinds of green technologies

have become cheaper, are becoming more widely accessible. Of course, on policy level, we've seen things like the Inflation Reduction Act from the US and the Green Deal from Europe, and all that can be leveraged because the faster we cut emissions, the less pain the planet will suffer. Right, And this really comes through in this report because as we talked about it, is a synthesis of three other longer,

bigger reports. The first one that came out back in twenty twenty one, was all about the physical science basis behind climate change. The second was about impacts, adaptation, and vulnerability, but the third was all about mitigation of climate change, which goes into these issues what mitigation means, and the more recent IPCC reports have also started to go beyond

just explaining what climate science says. Tackling climate change requires appending and moving to an energy system that does not cause global warming, and that level of change requires understanding how the messy geopolitics of the energy transition will work out, how humans will react to rapid changes, and it requires sociologists and political scientists and all kinds of other fields to weigh in on what will be a difficult transition.

Do all those things, and what the IPCC reports find is that many of these solutions that address climate change also have co benefits in improving health outcomes for people and for biodiversity on the planet. What picture does the report paint in terms of the levels of jeopardy the

climate change is currently posing humanity? I mean, clearly, if you read it with a cold rational head, you will walk away with your hair on fire, because that is how urgent the situation is, you walk away with your hair on fire, that you must do something about it. Because it says there are many, many possible pathways still available for humans to act on the problem before it's

too late. However, that doesn't always translate into policy at the government level because there is usually a big upfront effort and cost involved in deploying many of these solutions, and for some governments that is too big a leap to dig even today. So with that in mind, who uses this report. Is it just the biggest, best, most well fact checked body of scientific knowledge gathering dust in a library somewhere, or is this being translated into usable

effective policies. Given the scale of the report and how many things it touches on, it is being used and widely. We talked about how IPCC reports have translated into net zero goals. Now these are decades out, but there are others who use it for immediate purposes. Corporations, for example, take Unilever, a global company that produces food on one part of the planet, processes it somewhere else, and then

sells it another place. That chain of events only works because of the stability of the climate as it has existed for the vast amount of human existence. Unilever has been around for about one hundred years, and as a corporation, would like to be around for another hundred years. So Unilever looks at climate reports to understand the risks that climate impacts are going to cost to its supply chain. And that's just one of hundreds of thousands of corporations

that are making use of IPCC analysis. Then there are investors who use IPCC reports because they use those models to understand where to put money that would produce decent returns, to put it in companies that are going to worsen the climate crisis and make their entire portfolio unstable, or to invest in companies that would solve this problem and help the rest of the portfolio. Yeah, and it's not

just corporations investors looking at these reports either. It also feeds into the work of NGOs, climate activists political campaigners who are hoping to translate the messages of these big impactful climate reports into something that can be understood by the wider public, and they show up at public events

like the Annual Climate Conference. Again that happens under the ages of the United Nations, where all these countries meet to set policies on how to address all things climate change, which go from not just how we cut emissions, but also what investments do we need to make to adapt to a warming planet and what do we need to do if we are to compensate for the damages that climate change is causing. That is all informed by this underlying solid piece of science that the inter Governmental Panel

on Climate Change produces every seven years. Well, thank you very much a chat for explaining today's IPCC report, and thanks for staying up late to record this with me. Thank you for listening to Zero. If you enjoyed this episode, please take a moment to rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. This is the first time we tried one of these bonus episodes, so let us know what you think. You can email us at Zero pod at Bloomberg dot Net. Zero's producer is me Oscar

Boyd and our senior producer is Christine driscoll. Our theme music is composed by Wanderley Special Thanks to Kirabnjam and Eric Roston for their help on this episode. We've linked to Eric's reporting on the latest IPCC report in the show notes. We'll be back with the regular episode of Zero on Thursday. You want to be to