5 Top Takeaways from the IPCC 6th Report

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released its 6th report on the physical basis of climate change. The report pulls together the entire body of research related to climate change, writing summaries intended for informed readers, such as policymakers. Their reports are considered the gold standard of climate change understanding, as everything in the report has essentially undergone double review. It is the best of the best.

Global average temperature, reconstructed from paleoclimate data until the mid-1800s (blue shading and line), then taken from instrument observed records (black line). The blue bar on the right is the estimated temperature during the warmest multi-century period in the last 100,000 years (which happened about 6,500 years ago, under a warmer part of the orbital cycles than we are in now). From Figure SPM.1.

Here are 5 top takeaways (among dozens):

1. There are no surprises.

The IPCC is a group of hundreds of scientists from around the globe. They do not do any new research specifically to produce this climate change report, though many of them did contribute to the research included in the report. All of the results in the report are collected from existing research that has been vetted by top climate change experts and published in expert formats like peer-reviewed journals. By its nature, nothing in the IPCC report is new.

Additionally, every single sentence in the summary of the report has to be approved by all of the contributors, line by line. Have you ever put 200 scientists in a room and listened to the friendly debates around the room? I have, at a number of scientific conferences through the years. Heck, I’ve watched three reviewers on a paper going…