A changing world

By Michael J.W. Stickings

A soon-to-be-released report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) will announce that global warming is "already having major impacts on the natural world":

Draft versions seen by BBC News warn it will be hard for societies to adapt to all the likely climate impacts.

The report is set to say that a temperature rise above 1.5C from 1990 levels would put about one-third of species at risk of extinction.

More than one billion people would be at greater risk of water shortages, primarily because of the melting of mountain glaciers and ice fields which act as natural reservoirs.

The deniers will continue to deny -- the U.S. wants less "quantification" in the report, and Russia and China have expressed their "concerns" -- but there is now astonishing scientific consensus on what is happening to our world. And it doesn't look good.

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For more, I highly recommend Elizabeth Kolbert's Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change, a truly excellent book on the climate crisis that I just finished reading.

Kolbert reports from the front lines of global warming and does so lucidly, with historical context and scientific prowess, and without hyperbole -- the climate crisis hardly needs exaggeration.