More confirmation of climate disruption and the urgency that's called for

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued its latest report this week on the state of climate change and it's not pretty.

Here are but a few tidbits of the bad news in the report (with my editorial comments):

• Human influence on the climate is clear and recent emissions are the highest in history. (Not surprising, but still news to some people, apparently.)
• The warming of the climate system is clear and, since the 1950’s, many of the observed changes are unprecedented.
• Each of the last three decades have been successively warmer than any decade before them going back to 1850.
• In the Northern Hemisphere, the last 30 years is likely the warmest 30-year period of the past 1,400 years.
• From 1880 to 2012, the earth has warmed .85 degrees C.
• More than 90 percent of the energy stored in the climate system from 1971 to 2010 is in the form of ocean warming; only one percent is stored in the atmosphere. (Uh-oh.)
• The upper ocean -- the top 75 meters -- has warmed by .11 degrees C per decade since 1971, offering an explanation for the so-called slowdown in atmospheric warming.  (Are you listening, climate deniers?)

Note: The report issued this week is the third part -- the "synthesis" report -- of the fifth IPCC  report issued over the years. Confused? This might help. Want to read the report for yourself? Here's the 100+ page version  and here's the 40-page summary for policy makers.

All this new bad news just reinforces what readers of PennFuture's blogs likely already know: The climate is in crisis so we must act now at all levels of government to limit carbon emissions.

Joy Bergey is PennFuture's federal policy director. She's based in Philadelphia and tweets @JoyBergey.