What I learned (and still want to know) from the UN Climate Change Report

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change recently released the final draft of their latest report, so I decided to take a look at it. Their conclusion: we are most definitely seeing the effects of climate change, and these effects will continue to worsen. If we do manage to make major reductions in our CO2 output, we can mitigate some of the worst results, but some of the most troubling changes are more-or-less permanent and can’t be easily reversed through a few years of austerity.

I know that’s probably not shocking to most of us, but hopefully it will serve as a wakeup call for some whose heads are still buried in the sand. But more importantly, this report also brings up a bunch of questions about what this means for you and me on a practical basis.

What is this IPCC anyways?

For the uninformed (admittedly myself until I started seeing headlines about the report), the IPCC is the UN body for assessing the science related to climate change. It has 195 member nations, and scientists from all over the world contribute to its reports, which compile the latest scientific research. None of what they are saying is controversial in the scientific community, and their report attempts to catalog the current state of accepted facts. The current report is…