The breakneck speed of global warming exceeds the pace of efforts to protect billions of vulnerable people, according to a new report released Monday by the world’s top climate scientists. The report warns of a growing mismatch between rising temperatures and slow, fragmented efforts to adapt, leaving little time for catching up before "a brief and rapidly closing window of opportunity” is sealed shut.
"With fact upon fact, this report reveals how people and the planet are getting clobbered by climate change,” said UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, calling the 3,500-page document "an atlas of human suffering” and an indictment of a "criminal” "abdication of leadership.” To underscore the challenges to global cooperation, Russia’s military invasion of Ukraine will likely overshadow the first major report in nearly eight years on climate vulnerability.
This is the second doorstop document released in less than six months from the United Nations-backed Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), with two additional reports expected before the end of the year. Researchers in the latest volume focused on the unpreparedness of nations to cope with climate instability and compounding stressors from higher temperatures, now at 1.1 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.