Every few years, the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) produces assessment reports that are the most comprehensive scientific evaluations of the state of earth’s climate.
unequivocal meaning “not ambiguous.” Or “without a shadow of doubt.”
In fact, they use the word a grand total of 32 times throughout the document and dare I say, for good reason.
The IPCC reports are created by three working groups of scientists. Working Group-I, whose report has been released on Monday, deals with the scientific basis for climate change. Working Group-II looks at the likely impacts, vulnerabilities and adaptation issues, while Working Group-III deals with actions that can be taken to combat climate change.
They are “unequivocal” about their conclusions.
“The evidence for human influence on recent climate change has strengthened progressively from the IPCC second assessment report [in 1995] to the AR5 [in 2013-14] and is even stronger in this assessment, including for regional scales and for extremes.”
Previously, they could not link a specific event to warmer temperatures caused by human activity. But this is no longer a challenge, as weather attribution studies can now be rapidly produced, as was done by the World Weather Attribution initiative for the North American heatwave in July 2021. It had concluded that the heatwave would be “virtually impossible” without human-driven climate change.
That much is unequivocal.
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