The U.N.'s Nobel Prize-winning panel for assessing the science behind climate change has elected a new leader who wants you to know there's plenty of reason to worry – but not so much that you're paralyzed by fear.
The 195-nation Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which wrapped up elections in Nairobi on Saturday, will be led by Jim Skea, a Scottish energy expert who hopes to make everyone's voices heard.
The Geneva-based body, part of the World Meteorological Organization, provides the world's most authoritative scientific assessments of climate change based on the work of thousands of scientists. Those assessments are used to inform governments and industry about the options for dealing with rising temperatures.
Skea said IPCC's priorities under his watch will be to improve inclusiveness and diversity, shield the scientific integrity and policy relevance of IPCC assessment reports, and make effective use of the best available science on climate change.
“Climate change is an existential threat to our planet," he said. "My ambition is to lead an IPCC that is truly representative and inclusive, an IPCC looking to the future while exploiting the opportunities that we have in the present. An IPCC where everyone feels valued and heard."
The importance of messaging
Skea, who has almost 40 years of climate science experience and expertise, will head IPCC for its seventh assessment cycle. A professor of sustainable energy at Imperial College in London, he won in a 90-69 runoff against Thelma Krug, a Brazilian statistician serving as IPCC vice-chair.
Afterward, Skea told Der Spiegel "the world won't end if it warms more than 1.5° Celsius" beyond the pre-industrial era, but it will be "a more dangerous world."
Nonetheless, he said, there are good reasons to remain optimistic because "every measure we take to weaken climate change helps."
"If you constantly communicate the message that we are all doomed to extinction," he explained to German news agency dpa, "then that paralyzes people and prevents them from taking the necessary steps to get a grip on climate change."
Holding to the 1.5° limit
The IPCC elections marked the end of the sixth assessment cycle and installed a new chair, three vice-chairs and 30 other members of the IPCC Bureau, along with 12 members of the Task Force Bureau on National Greenhouse Gas Inventories.
The three vice-chairs are Ladislaus Chang’a of Tanzania, Diana Ürge-Vorsatz of Hungary and Ramón Pichs-Madruga of Cuba.
The 2015 Paris Agreement obliged nations to limit human-induced climate change to no more than 2° of warming above pre-industrial levels, or preferably 1.5°.
The world has already warmed by about 1.2° since the industrial era began, and July's heat is likely the hottest that Earth has been in 120,000 years.
The U.N. weather agency now says there's a 66% likelihood the annual average near-surface global temperature between 2023 and 2027 will breach the 1.5° limit for at least a year.
