Sustained emissions reductions and the rapidly dropping costs of renewables were some positive notes in the latest IPCC installment. (By AndreaTWeather)
For years, climate scientists have been saying that time is increasingly of the essence if the world is to stave off the worst effects of the climate crisis. But they have repeated it once again in the third and final installment of the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change , which was released on Monday. The technology to do so is on hand, they emphasized, if governments can commit to the needed changes in policy.
To learn more about the key insights of the report, Scientific American spoke with one of its lead authors, Sarah Burch, a climate policy researcher at the University of Waterloo in Ontario.How has our scientific understanding changed and the key messages shifted, compared with the previous IPCC report in 2014?
The cost of solar [energy] per unit has gone down 85 percent and wind by 55 percent, lithium-ion batteries by 85 percent. And those were not completely unexpected but much, much more significant drops in cost than were anticipated in the last assessment cycle. So that’s a really important, I think, factor in looking forward to see whether or not we can produce enough low-carbon renewable energy to meet our needs.
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