The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has found that climate change isn't just real, its impact is already being felt. With record setting weather extremes across the globe, a new report urges lawmakers to work quickly to reduce human impact on the environment.
"A temperature increase of just 4 degrees Celcius combines with more hungry people could pose a great risk to food security."
The IPCC released a summary of the report for policy makers. The report stresses that climate changes have already been felt, and that action now simply buys time to adjust to the changing climate. Chris Field, the co-chair of IPCC, spoke with the BBC about the "ambitious investment" needed to combat climate change.
"With ambitious mitigation and adaptation those risks are substantially decreased."
Though skeptics of human-influenced climate change point out that temperatures haven't risen nearly as much in the last century as models projected they would. Many scientist say this is because the changes have manifested themselves in different ways.
In the past year many extremes associated with the changing temperatures have made headlines. The extreme heat in Australia, flooding in the UK and super typhoon Haiyan that struck the Philippines.
The latest report marks the fifth released by the panel, so what makes this report different? According to the report itself, "a substantially larger knowledge base of relevant scientific, technical, and socioeconomic literature."
This particular part of the reports is focused on management of climate change, and nearly 1,000 scientists contributed to it. The last two parts of the extensive report will be released between now and November.
