– Why the United Nations Report has Missed Its Mark

by Dr. Adam Fenech, Director, Climate Lab, University of Prince Edward Island

Last week saw the release of a major international climate change report authored by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a body of experts convened by the United Nations that has become the leading scientific authority on climate change. The report titled Climate Change 2022: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability was written by 270 researchers from 67 countries over the past seven years, and is the most detailed look to-date at the threats posed by global warming. The results in its over 3,500 pages are striking: The dangers of climate change are mounting so rapidly that they could soon overwhelm the ability of both nature and humanity to adapt, creating a harrowing future in which floods, fires and famine displace millions, species disappear and the planet is irreversibly damaged.

I wish those were the authors words. Instead, pages and pages of bureaucratic language are given that even the most interested of us find difficult to read and comprehend. The opening “headline” from a summary of the report is: Human-induced climate change, including more frequent and intense extreme events, has caused widespread adverse impacts and related losses and damages to nature and people, beyond natural climate variability. Yawn! Has the time come for the IPCC to abandon its work if the results of seven years are as impotent as this summary of the report?

I am a climatologist who has been in the climate change business for almost thirty-four years. Why are we still receiving such ineffectual statements from the United Nations while Nature is screaming at us to take notice of how climate change is disrupting our lives? Here is what a quick scan of my memory from the past year tells us:

1. Ontario forest fires burned a record area of land (more than 793,000 hectares of land – almost one-and-a-half times the size of Prince Edward island) this past summer, more than in any year in history.
2. The June heat wave in British Columbia has been called the “deadliest weather event in Canadian history” where a record breaking heat dome brought temperatures above 40 degrees Celsius in many parts of the province directly causing the deaths of 570 people. The town of Lytton was wiped off the map, destroyed by the intense heat from forest fires.
3. The North American western drought is now the driest in at least 1,200 years and shows no signs of easing. Attribution science tells us that 42% of the drought conditions are directly from human-caused warming.
4. In November, one of the most severe natural disasters to strike British Columbia in a generation forced 20,000 people to abandon their homes after a major storm caused flooding and mudslides.

All of these are worst-case climate change scenarios playing themselves out live right now, while the United Nations pulls out its thesaurus to come up with one more boring descriptor after another. I am frightened by what I am witnessing out in the real world, and maybe we all should consider that more closely. The IPCC report notes that nearly half of the world’s population is already vulnerable to increasingly dangerous climate impacts. Climate change is changing the baseline conditions toward a hotter, drier state meaning that conditions will only get worse. “There is a brief and rapidly closing window to secure a liveable future on the planet,” says Hans-Otto Portner, co-chair of the IPCC working group that generated the report. “We need to live up to that challenge.”