It is eagerly awaited worldwide: the latest edition of the IPCC climate report. This report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is published every six to eight years and provides the latest state of play on climate change.
The UN climate panel has collected, assessed and summarized all scientific climate knowledge from recent years. The summary of this extensive IPCC report is seen as the basis for future climate agreements to reduce global warming.
Global view on climate change
The report, which will be published tomorrow, contains no new discoveries about the climate. The panel’s scientists looked at 14,000 international climate studies. These have been assessed and analyzed to arrive at an overall picture of the current state of the climate system around the world.
A special summary of about 25 pages has been written about the voluminous report, the so-called summary for policymakers. Delegations from 130 countries reviewed this summary sentence by sentence. What will soon be on the table has therefore been accepted and approved by scientists and policymakers from many governments. And that is important because we are close to a global political climate summit, which will be held in Glasgow in the autumn.
The state of global warming, as recorded in the IPCC report, has also been used in the past as an important basis for new climate agreements, such as in the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement.
The importance for the Netherlands
For the Netherlands, this IPCC report will mainly concern the latest insights into sea level rise, thinks the Dutch delegation leader Rob van Dorland. The big question for our country is how fast the ice in Antarctica will melt. There are many uncertainties in this and the new IPCC report will discuss this in detail, he thinks.
Aimée Slangen, sea level researcher and co-author, also expects the report to come up with more concrete figures about the expected sea level rise. She also says that the melting of ice at the South Pole in particular is crucial for the Netherlands. We already understand more about how that works than with the previous IPCC report from 2013, according to Slangen.
This also applies to extreme weather, such as heavy precipitation and its influence on the Netherlands, says Van Dorland, himself a climate researcher at the KNMI. Since the last report of the climate panel, many more observations have become available. Satellites in particular allow us to zoom in more accurately on the entire climate system. With those observations, you can also better understand the entire system, he says.
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