New IPCC climate report contains everything you need to know
Enlarge / The IPCC chair and secretary preside over a marathon final approval session. (credit: IPCC/Antoine Tardy)
The reports produced by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) are massive undertakings, requiring years of effort and hundreds of scientists who volunteer as authors. The sixth assessment report cycle saw its first documents released in 2018, and five more followed through 2022. Today puts a coda on that cycle, as the condensed Synthesis Report is out.
The first three reports were focused on narrow topics: the 1.5C warming milestone, land use and climate change, and the world's oceans and ice. The next three followed the traditional structure of previous assessment reports: the physical science of climate change, the impacts of climate change, and solutions.
Each of these reports is meant to represent the state of scientific knowledge on a topic so decision-makers and other interested readers don't have to take on the many thousands of published studies that form their foundation. The role of the Synthesis Report is to further distill the most important information into the simplest reference that the scientists can bear to put their stamp of approval on. The 18 key conclusions in this report provide an impressively comprehensive yet succinct description of our situation-the ultimate TL;DR of Earth's climate.