The Detail: What we can learn from the climate change report
The Detail is a daily news podcast produced for RNZ by Newsroom and is published on Stuff with permission. Click on this link to subscribe to the podcast. Another year, another report from the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change warning breathlessly of the catastrophic impact of global warming unless we humans start to take things seriously . Whats changed? Not a huge amount when it comes to the science, says Stuff climate change editor Eloise Gibson ... but quite a lot when it comes to the messaging. This report was less specialised, less dense, Gibson said, and appeared to have among its aims influencing governments through people power. The more that 'normal people' understood about what was happening, the easier it would be for citizens themselves to hold their own governments to account. READ MORE: * Is it time to ban onshore exploration for fossils fuels? * Why communicating climate change has never been so important * IPCC report shows that limiting global warming is what matters most * For Jacinda Ardern's Labour, the future of climate change must be now * Planetary healthcheck delivers 'unprecedented', 'terrifying' picture On today's episode, Emile Donovan sits down with Gibson to discuss the good, bad and ugly headlines from the IPCC's sixth assessment report . The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was formed in 1988. It released its first report in 1990. And in the interceding 31 years, the science remained largely the same, Gibson said. The fundamental message hasn't changed that much. Certainly it's gotten stronger, more solid, more widely accepted, but there's nothing in the latest report that researchers didn't know 30 years ago. Had we started in earnest on this transition 30 years ago, we would have a lot of these things cracked by now. We're certainly capable of doing it. While the big picture hasn't changed too much, the language used to communicate its ideas has . The first take away of the report is: the effects of climate change are here ... and they're here now, it's not something that a model on a computer is telling us is going to happen in 100 years' time. The second was that it's now inarguable, incontrovertible that these changes are being caused by us and the signal of that, versus the noise of natural variability, is now very clear as well. The third take away is that some of these impacts are now baked in. Seas are going to keep rising for centuries or millennia now, because of temperature changes that we've already produced. We can't do anything about that. And the atmosphere is going to keep warming for 20 or 30 years now, in even the best-case scenario. But the final take away is that it's not too late to put the brakes on and stop it getting worse. The IPCC's most recent assessment report before this one came out eight years ago and was criticised for its inaccessibility and dense language: scientists writing for other scientists. However, Gibson said that was very different this year. The summary of the report the wording of which has to be agreed on by all the governments involved with the IPCC, which is a politically delicate, weeks-long process as representatives veto and sanitise certain words and phrasing is much more accessible. Gibson suggested this could be a deliberate act on the part of the IPCC to encourage people to engage with and understand the ideas in the report, and force their own governments to act . This is something that affects all of us ... We should be able to understand it, we should be able to read it. RNZ