A call for action after grim climate report

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Editor's note: Confirming apprehensions of the global scientific and environmental community, the latest report prepared by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, made dire assessments and predictions about the present and future of the world’s climate in its summary report for policymakers released early this week.  “It is unequivocal that human influence has warmed the atmosphere, ocean and land. Widespread and rapid changes in the atmosphere, ocean, cryosphere and biosphere have occurred,” the sixth assessment report of the first working group of IPCC said. As a consequence, the report predicted that the average global temperature would rise by 1.5 degrees Celsius before 2040 and this would be applicable for all five emission scenarios it had considered. That is a decade earlier than the previously estimated year of 2050 for such a rise.   The report assesses what has happened thus far in the context of climate change due to human activities and has also predicted what is likely to happen in the near and distant future in different regions of the world as well as what will happen to …