The Next IPCC Report: A Few Words
Hi people. I hope you’re all doing well.
So tomorrow, the next IPCC climate report (IPCC Assessment Report 6, Working Group I) will come out at around 10am CEST. It is expected to be an incredibly strong warning about the climate crisis, with a lot of alarming language. And most news sites will likely talk about this report in one way or another.
It is, of course, your choice whether or not you read this report, or whether or not you read the summaries that will be on news sites tomorrow. I will be doing so, and I suggest that you do as well, but only if you are in the right frame of mind to engage with what could be a lot of bad climate news.
If you do choose to read the report and/or the summaries in the news, or go on social media to talk about it or read about it, here are a few heads-up.
1) The news headlines about this report may be misleading. Do you remember when the last IPCC report came out in 2018? It told us that we had around 12 years (at that point) to halve global emissions if we wanted to limit warming to below 1.5 degrees C.
The media, and especially people on social media, focused so heavily on the ‘12 years’ figure that a lot of people - especially a lot of young people - thought that the IPCC had said that there were only 12 years left until the literal end of the world, or that we would all die if we went over 1.5 degrees. None of which is actually true.
I worry that the media, as well as social media, will do the same with this report. They’ll take one part of the report, and use it as a frightening headline in order to catch people’s eyes and make them panic.
And sometimes this works. Sometimes fear can be used to mobilise people. But don’t forget who these headlines are intended to scare: people who aren’t aware of the climate emergency yet. If you’ve been paying attention to the climate crisis, you know what’s going on, and you’re likely already dealing with climate anxiety. These headlines are not for you.
I read this article about the IPCC report today, and I immediately wanted to share it on here, so there it is. Please read it - I’m sure some of you will find it useful.
Here are some quotes from the article that stood out to me:
“…there’s going to be an onslaught of downright dystopian headlines in the news this week. They will be designed for maximum terror. And for those of us, like me, who are prone to incapacitating climate grief and anxiety, browsing the internet is going to be a mental health minefield.”
“As you’re exposed to headlines that are crafted to grab the attention of the disengaged, don’t let fear eat you alive.”
Please keep these in mind tomorrow. I certainly will do - they’re good advice. It might be hard, but please take steps to take care of your mental health. Basically, stay safe and stay sane - or at least try to. Don’t ignore or forget about the climate emergency, but take some time to yourself, and try not to let yourself get swallowed by your own (or other people’s) fear and despair.
2) Social media will likely be full of misinformation about the report. I’ve talked about ‘climate doomers’ before on here, and if you’ve been following me for a while, you know how I feel about them.
After the release of this report, there is going to be a lot of climate doomism on social media. There will be people on social media - people outside of the scientific community - who insist that this IPCC report means that it’s too late to do anything about the climate crisis, or that any sort of action is futile, or that we just have to accept our fate and go quietly.
Please do not listen to these people. The IPCC reports do not say ‘it’s too late’ - they say the opposite, as do the vast majority of climate scientists. We do not have to ‘give up’ or ‘accept our fate’; what we do still matters, and it will always matter.
Some of these people will tell you that the IPCC is “too conservative” (i.e. underestimates climate change), and therefore cannot be trusted. Therefore, they follow outsider ‘scientists’ (whose predictions are often much more wrong than those of the IPCC), and use their research as ‘evidence’ that we’re doomed.
(Again, these people are wrong, and this is basically the anti-vaxxer and climate denier level of science.)
While the IPCC has sometimes underestimated some impacts of climate change, i.e. past sea level rise, impacts have still generally been within their expected range, and not wildly outside of it. Also, scientific models and predictions are never 100% accurate - there is always a margin of error.
I will repeat myself: our house is on fire, not burned to ashes. We won’t be able to save everything, but we still have to work to save everything and everyone that we can. What climate doomers want us all to do is to just stand there in the burning house and quietly await the end without even trying to save ourselves and everything else. That doesn’t make sense to me, and in terms of the climate crisis, it’s a massive abdication of responsibility.
Please think critically about what you read on social media about this. If you need to, take a break from social media. Even without the doomism, there will likely be a lot of grief and fear and anger on social media tomorrow - if this will affect your mental health, please step away from it.
Don’t forget that no matter what you read, and no matter what anyone on social media tells you, the vast majority of climate scientists will agree with these things: it’s real, it’s bad, but it’s not over.
3) Nothing in this report should be particularly new to us. As I’ve said before: if you’ve been paying attention, what is in tomorrow’s report should not be new to you. The IPCC reports are basically aggregations of thousands of different research papers about different aspects of the climate emergency, including its impacts.
If you follow climate news on a regular basis, you should already know about these impacts, as well as what could be coming if we don’t do the right thing. As scary as all of this together may be, none of this is new to us.
I may be wrong about this. Maybe there will be something in the report that comes as a surprise to some of us, like another ‘deadline’, a tipping point we’ve reached, or some research that didn’t make the news. Be prepared for that possibility. But as it stands right now, most if not all of this stuff should already be known to us.
And again, no matter what comes up in the report, what we have to do remains the same: cut greenhouse gas emissions as much as possible, as quickly as possible.
4) The report will probably be extremely worrying and contain a lot of bad news, and that’s a good thing in a way. Back in 2018, when the last report was released, we were warned that we did not have a lot of time left to keep warming below 1.5 degrees C.
After that, what did we see? We saw Extinction Rebellion’s civil disobedience movement. We saw Greta Thunberg’s school strike movement. We saw millions of people, all over the world, waking up to the climate emergency, and making it clear that we wouldn’t go down without a fight. We saw a huge increase in climate activism, both on the streets and online, because people started to realise what was at stake and what we had to do to ensure a safe future for human civilisation. More people were talking about the climate emergency than ever before.
And this next IPCC report is expected to be an even stronger warning than the last. Is it going to be scary? Probably. But as I’ve said before, a healthy level of fear is sometimes useful, especially in a crisis. If people read this report or see it being talked about in the news, become aware of what is happening to this planet, and then are able to channel their fear and anger and grief into action, then that is a very good thing.
In this situation, knowledge is power. We can’t fight the climate crisis if most people do not know about the climate crisis. If this report creates a collective knowledge of the climate crisis within society, then hopefully that knowledge will one day become our power.
And we need kindness as well - we need to be there for each other through all of this, and we need people, especially young people who have just become aware of the climate emergency, to know that their worries are justified, but that they will not be alone through all of this. We can’t just terrify people with bad news and leave them on their own with their fear, we have to provide them with resources and support as well.
I will leave you with all of this, and I will pin this post so everyone can see it. If you’re going to read the report tomorrow, please stay safe, stay sane, take care of yourself, and keep all of this in mind.
And always remember: we don’t yet know what is going to happen next, and anyone who tells you that they know the future is lying to you. We know that we can’t save everything, but all isn’t lost either. There is still joy in the world, and there are lots of beautiful things and wonderful people on our planet, and all of them deserve a safe future.
Take care, people. Have a great day. 💚
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