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Skip to main content Open Navigation Menu Menu Warnings About Humanity’s Future Don’t Get More Dire Than This * Security * Politics * Gear * The Big Story * Business * Science * Culture * Ideas * Merch * Cyber Monday Sign In Subscribe Search Search * Security * Politics * Gear * The Big Story * Business * Science * Culture * Ideas * Merch * Cyber Monday * Podcasts * Video * Newsletters * Magazine * Travel * Steven Levy's Plaintext Column * WIRED Classics from the Archive * Events * WIRED Insider * WIRED Consulting * Jobs * Coupons Close Banner Close Don't miss our picks for the biggest and best shopping day of the year. 00 Days : 02 Hours : 57 Minutes : 59 Seconds Shop NowAll Products Tested and Reviewed by WIRED Editors Matt Simon Science Mar 20, 2023 9:00 AM WARNINGS ABOUT HUMANITY’S FUTURE DON’T GET MORE DIRE THAN THIS The planet is on track for catastrophic warming unless countries take extreme action, according to the IPCC’s latest climate report. Photograph: Andrii Chagovets/Getty Images Save this storySave Save this storySave If you buy something using links in our stories, we may earn a commission. This helps support our journalism. Learn more. Please also consider subscribing to WIRED Today the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is releasing what may become a pivotal document of human progress—or lack thereof, if we don’t heed its warnings. It’s a “synthesis” report, summarizing the findings from the six previous IPCC reports that laid out the science of climate change, like how the food system spews greenhouse gas emissions and how the oceans and polar regions are transforming. The report is a full-throated call for the massive—yet doable—changes our species must enact to limit the damage that comes with each fraction of a degree of warming. It’s a temporary adieu of sorts, as the next climate report from the IPCC won’t land for at least another five years. “There is a rapidly closing window of opportunity to secure a liveable and sustainable future for all,” the report notes. “The choices and actions implemented in this decade will have impacts now and for thousands of years.” SCIENCE NEWSLETTER Your weekly roundup of the best stories on health care, the climate crisis, new scientific discoveries, and more. Delivered on Wednesdays. Sign up By signing up, you agree to our user agreement (including class action waiver and arbitration provisions), and acknowledge our privacy policy. The more warming occurs, the harder it will be to mitigate it—to preserve human health, agriculture, and the natural world. Some effects, like the collapse of ecosystems, will be irreversible. “The Synthesis Report underlines how important it is to not only accelerate climate action, but to do it in a way that helps everyone in the world, not just those in the wealthiest countries and regions,” said report coauthor Christopher Trisos, director of the Climate Risk Lab at the African Climate and Development Initiative, in a statement. Featured Video Biologist Answers Even More Biology Questions From Twitter The science of climate change is “unequivocal,” the report stresses: We’ve already warmed the planet by 1.1 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels—spawning fiercer wildfires, heat waves, droughts, and storms, which are killing people and destabilizing ecosystems. But just how much the planet will keep warming, and how quickly, depends on a full deck of wild cards, such as future economic development and poorly understood feedback loops like permafrost thawing and carbon release. Scientists also don’t have a good handle on the global influence of the aerosols produced by burning fossil fuels, which tend to cool the atmosphere—if we decarbonize (and we must), we might actually lose some of that air conditioning. Still, it’s becoming increasingly clear that we’re going to blow past the Paris Agreement’s goal of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees. To avoid that fate, we’d have to cut emissions in half by 2030. In fact, emissions are increasing, the report notes. “By now, even the most optimistic among scientists think that that train has left,” says Claudia Tebaldi, a climate scientist at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, who was a lead author on a previous IPCC report but wasn’t involved in the new synthesis. “We may be able to return to 1.5, but we would need a miracle to be able to stay below 1.5.” Negative emissions techniques, like sucking carbon out of the atmosphere, could reduce warming. Indeed, the new report says these technologies will be necessary to bring temperatures down from an “overshoot.” Yet they are not yet proven at anywhere near the scale needed to make a dent in atmospheric carbon. Most Popular * Gear The DJI Mic Mini Is Tiny, Wireless, and Doesn't Compromise on Sound By Julian Chokkattu * Gear 13 White Elephant Gifts Worth Fighting Over By Nena Farrell * Gear Our Favorite Smartwatches Do Much More Than Just Tell Time By Julian Chokkattu * Gear Our Favorite Advent Calendars of 2024 By Louryn Strampe * Today, the plummeting price of renewables is helping humanity decarbonize: Wind energy prices dropped by 55 percent in the 2010s, the new report notes, while solar power and lithium ion batteries got 85 percent cheaper—much cheaper than researchers had anticipated. Lower prices have allowed for the proliferation of solar panels, reducing dependence on fossil fuels. Scientists are scrambling to figure out where to put them all, like on rooftop gardens and croplands, over canals, or floating on reservoirs. Advertisement The report “makes it clear that the world has made some progress on climate change—there is some good news,” says Zeke Hausfather, a research scientist at Stripe and the nonprofit Berkeley Earth, who wasn’t involved in the synthesis. “At the same time, there’s such a big gap between where we are right now—and even where countries have committed to be by 2030—and what is needed to meet our most ambitious climate targets.” The future is uncertain. When scientists model climate change, they imagine different scenarios in which humanity reduces emissions, keeps them steady, or increases them. These models spit out a range of figures for potential warming. Not long ago, scientists were estimating that an increase of 4 or 5 degrees could be possible, given emissions trajectories. But modeling last year by Hausfather and his colleagues found that if countries stick to their reduction pledges, we could keep warming under 2 degrees. “We can be cautiously optimistic about the direction of these trends, and also realize that technology’s not going to save us all by itself,” says Hausfather. “Without stronger policies to propel these adoptions, we’re not going to meet our targets.” The new IPCC report lands in the middle of those ranges—it warns that unless policymakers get a lot more ambitious about reductions, we could be heading toward a rise of around 3 degrees by the year 2100. Given the severity of the environmental damage we’re already seeing at 1.1 degrees of warming, it would be an unfathomable escalation. Hausfather sees hope that we might head this future off. Last year, the United States passed the Inflation Reduction Act, which allocates hundreds of billions of dollars toward juicing the green economy and incentivizing people to climate-proof their homes. The invasion of Ukraine has forced Europe to wean itself off of Russian gas and adopt more clean technologies like heat pumps. “What China is doing with electric vehicles is huge,” says Hausfather, referring to the country’s rapid adoption of EVs. And as the price of renewable energy falls, he continues, “solving this is probably going to be a lot cheaper than we thought it was a decade ago.” Most Popular * Gear The DJI Mic Mini Is Tiny, Wireless, and Doesn't Compromise on Sound By Julian Chokkattu * Gear 13 White Elephant Gifts Worth Fighting Over By Nena Farrell * Gear Our Favorite Smartwatches Do Much More Than Just Tell Time By Julian Chokkattu * Gear Our Favorite Advent Calendars of 2024 By Louryn Strampe * The food system, though, is going to be trickier to decarbonize. A study published earlier this month estimated that the industry alone could add a degree Celsius of warming by 2100. But it also pointed to powerful levers that can be pulled to control emissions: Three quarters of that warming would come from methane-heavy industries like dairy and livestock production (cows burp a lot) and rice cultivation (bacteria that emit the gas grow in flooded rice fields). Methane is 80 times more potent than CO2, but disappears from the atmosphere in 10 years rather than centuries. Changes like driving down demand for beef or developing feed additives to keep cows from belching could all help reduce warming quickly. Decarbonization comes with other benefits, the report notes, known as multisolving. Adding a green space to a city, for instance, absorbs carbon, cools the air, mitigates flooding, improves mental health, and may let residents grow more of their own food, increasing food security while reducing shipping emissions. Switching from gasoline cars to EVs reduces both carbon dioxide and air pollution. “So suddenly, this transition to net zero is a major, major win for public health around the world,” says Elizabeth Sawin, founder and director of the Multisolving Institute, which focuses on climate solutions. The final installment in this IPCC series lands at a moment when humanity is reaching a crossroads: business as usual, or accelerating the green revolution. “If we act now,” said IPCC chair Hoesung Lee in a statement, “we can still secure a liveable sustainable future for all.” YOU MIGHT ALSO LIKE … * In your inbox: A new series of tips for how to use AI every day * Meet the masked vigilante tracking down billions in crypto scams * Deep dive: This app set out to fight pesticides. Now it sells them * How a 12-ounce layer of foam changed the NFL * Event: Join us for The Big Interview on December 3 in San Francisco Matt Simon was a senior staff writer covering biology, robotics, and the environment. He’s the author, most recently, of A Poison Like No Other: How Microplastics Corrupted Our Planet and Our Bodies. Contributor * X Topicsclimate changeenvironmentcarbon emissionsclimateEcologyextreme heatextreme weather SCIENCE NEWSLETTER Your weekly roundup of the best stories on health care, the climate crisis, new scientific discoveries, and more. Delivered on Wednesdays. Sign up By signing up, you agree to our user agreement (including class action waiver and arbitration provisions), and acknowledge our privacy policy. Read More The Food System Is Awful for the Climate. It Doesn’t Have to Be New modeling estimates that food production could add a degree Celsius to global warming. But it also points to powerful ways to make diets more sustainable. Matt Simon The Best Laptops to Work and Play Wherever You Are These are our favorite Windows laptops, MacBooks, Chromebooks, and Linux portables. Christopher Null The Best Gaming Headsets for Every System Lend depth and drama to your gameplay with the right gaming headset for any console or device. Eric Ravenscraft The Best Barefoot Shoes for Walking or Running Our favorite zero-drop, minimalist footwear will let you feel the ground beneath your feet. Scott Gilbertson The Best Touchscreen Gloves to Get You Through the Winter We braved the cold to answer a modern dilemma: Can you keep your hands warm and use a smartphone at the same time? Simon Hill The 5 Best Sunrise Alarms to Help You Rise and Shine If you want to wake up with the sun but aren’t a morning person, these bedside devices can simulate a sunrise whenever you want to rouse for the day (and a sunset, too). Nena Farrell The Best All-in-One Computers If you need a PC but don't want to ponder over all the specs and peripherals, get one of these all-in-one computers. Christopher Null Our 9 Favorite Down Comforters Snuggle up under our WIRED-tested favorites for every season and every budget. Louryn Strampe Which Safety App Should You Trust for Personal Protection? Your smartphone or wearable could be a lifeline in emergencies. These apps could make all the difference. Boutayna Chokrane The Best Beauty Box Subscriptions A beauty subscription box feels like a monthly present. These are our favorites. Louryn Strampe The Best Cheap Mattresses These are our favorite WIRED-tested mattresses you can buy online for $1,000 or less. Molly Higgins The Best Reusable Water Bottles That Aren't Stanley Cups Stay hydrated in style and cut down on single-use plastic with our favorite bottles—now updated with information on lead. Boutayna Chokrane WIRED is where tomorrow is realized. It is the essential source of information and ideas that make sense of a world in constant transformation. The WIRED conversation illuminates how technology is changing every aspect of our lives—from culture to business, science to design. The breakthroughs and innovations that we uncover lead to new ways of thinking, new connections, and new industries. More From WIRED * Subscribe * Newsletters * FAQ * WIRED Staff * Editorial Standards * Archive * RSS * Accessibility Help * Cyber Monday Reviews and Guides * Reviews * Buying Guides * Mattresses * Electric Bikes * Soundbars * Streaming Guides * Wearables * TVs * Coupons * Code Guarantee * Gift Guides * Advertise * Contact Us * Manage Account * Jobs * Press Center * Condé Nast Store * User Agreement * Privacy Policy * Your California Privacy Rights © 2024 Condé Nast. All rights reserved. WIRED may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate Partnerships with retailers. 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