IPCC 6th Assessment Report – Climate Change 2021 Is Out

The IPCC VI Assessment Report “Climate Change 2021: The Physical Science Basis” is now released.

The Working Group I contribution to the VI Assessment Report addresses the most up-to-date physical understanding of the climate system and climate change, bringing together the latest advances in climate science, and combining multiple lines of evidence from paleoclimate, observations, process understanding, and global and regional climate simulations.

Scientists are observing changes in the Earth’s climate in every region and across the whole climate system, according to the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Report, released today. Many of the changes observed in the climate are unprecedented in thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of years, and some of the changes already set in motion— such as continued sea-level rise — are irreversible over hundreds to thousands of years.

However, strong and sustained reductions in emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) and other greenhouse gases would limit climate change. While benefits for air quality would come quickly, it could take 20-30 years to see global temperatures stabilize, according to the IPCC VI AR.

Read the full IPCC VI Assessment Report “Climate Change 2021: The Physical Science Basis”.

In order to support such strong CO2 emissions reduction, Nuclear for Climate is calling on all negotiators and policymakers who are involved at COP26 to take a scientific and technology-neutral approach to energy policy and financing that can promote sustainable collaboration between nuclear and renewables.

Nuclear is a proven low-carbon source of energy that reduces greenhouse gas emissions and can replace our current reliance on polluting fossil fuel sources.

In the IPCC Special Report 2018 “Global Warming of 1.5 ºC” based on 6000 studies, four model pathways that would limit the global temperature rise to 1.5°C by 2100 were developed.

The four pathways (P1-P4) examined by the IPCC show the importance of studying different societal approaches and all these models include the use of nuclear power, stressing its positive impact tackling CO2 emissions.