IPCC report’s Sixth Assessment Report

Table of Contents

Context

Recently the IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report, titled “Climate Change 2021: The Physical Science Basis” was released by its authors.

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Key findings of the report

Indian Ocean: warming at a higher rate than other oceans.
Effects of climate change on India: will witness increased heatwaves and flooding.
- Increase in annual mean precipitation over India, with more severe rain expected over southern India in the coming decades.
- Monsoon extremes: likely to increase over India and South Asia, while the frequency of short intense rainy days is expected to rise.
- Lengthening of the monsoon over India by the end of the 21st century, with the South Asian monsoon precipitation projected to increase.
Ocean warming: would lead to a rise in sea levels, leading to frequent and severe coastal flooding in low level
- India would face significant threats from the rising seas as it has a 7,517 km coastline.
- Across six Indian port cities — Chennai, Kochi, Kolkata, Mumbai, Surat, and Visakhapatnam — 28.6 million people will be exposed to coastal flooding if sea levels rise 50cm.
Global warming: the planet is irrevocably headed towards warming by 1.5 degrees Celsius over pre-industrial times in the next two decades, mainly due to human activities.
- The goals of the Paris agreement are unlikely to be met unless extremely deep emission cuts are undertaken by all countries immediately.
- Projection by report: In the most ambitious emissions pathway, the globe would reach 1.5°C in the 2030s, overshoot to 1.6°C, with temperatures dropping back down to 1.4°C at the end of the century.
- Recommendation: countries strive to achieve net-zero emissions (no additional greenhouse gases are emitted) by 2050.
- India has not yet committed to a net-zero timeline.
Tropical cyclones are getting stronger and wetter, while arctic sea ice is dwindling in the summer and permafrost is thawing. All these trends will get worse.

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FAQs

What is the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) ?

The IPCC was created in 1988 by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), with the objective to provide governments at all levels with scientific information that they can use to develop climate policies.

What is the IPPCC's sixth assessment report?

The IPCC is currently preparing its Sixth Assessment Report (AR6). During this cycle, the Panel has produced three Special Reports, a Methodology Report on national greenhouse gas inventories, and is now working on the Sixth Assessment Report.
The Report addresses the most up-to-date physical understanding of the climate system and climate change, bringing together the latest advances in climate science, and combining multiple lines of evidence from paleoclimate, observations, process understanding, and global and regional climate simulations.

The Paris Agreement is related to?

Paris Agreement is an international agreement among countries toward restricting global warming below 2 degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial level. It further aims to limit the temperature increase even further to 1.5 degrees Celsius.