(Illustration found at NASA: A supercomputer model in 2015 created the above simulation of CO2 emissions in the atmosphere and portends the ghastly, horrible, monstrous-looking results if this shit continues).

Six years ago, the world maybe still had a chance to shift from the worst aspects of climate change, but now the sense is the calamity-clock has run out of time. This morning the UN report I’d been waiting for, and it’s even shittier than I’ figured — we’re in deep for some real-bad environmental disasters.

Although considered a ‘severe warning,’ humankind be like humankind:

This @IPCC_CH #ClimateReport is a severe warning regarding the well-being of human society & all life on Earth.

The only way to reach the 1.5C goal is through the rapid implementation of more ambitious NDCs.

Full @UNFCCC statement here: https://t.co/3nMhpP5x0D pic.twitter.com/id6Jd4HpRx

— UN Climate Change (@UNFCCC) August 9, 2021

Due to other alarming climate reports in recent weeks had preceded today’s bombshell — the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) sixth assessment report, entitled. “Climate Change 2021: the Physical Science Basis” —  there are zero shocks and surprises for anyone who’s been following the recent history of warming worldwide, though, the hardcore view of the immediate future is still dispiriting as shit.
Via the report’s statement:

The report identifies that the level of future emissions will determine the level of future temperature rise and the severity of future climate change and the associated impacts and risks. Not only have CO2 concentrations increased in the Earth’s atmosphere, but the rate of the increase has also sped up.
The report shows that greenhouse gas emissions from human activities are responsible for approximately 1.1°C of warming since 1850-1900, and finds that averaged over the next 20 years, global temperature is expected to reach or exceed 1.5°C of warming.

Unless there are rapid, sustained and large-scale reductions of climate change-causing greenhouse gas emissions, including CO2, methane and others, the goal of limiting global warming to 1.5C compared to pre-industrial levels, as enshrined in the Paris Agreement, will be beyond reach.

Cooperation, however, isn’t a big item in today’s way-divided world.

The UN assessment is by far the big news item in this morning’s cycle — The New York Times; The Washington Post; Reuters with a reaction from fossil fuels; CNN; NPR; and on and on — and it’s played as if the information was like a bolt-out-of-the-blue, which as I wrote, is way-not if you’ve been paying attention.

A view of the report’s data — per the BBC:

A couple of views on the IPCC report via the Guardian — first, the report itself:

Human activity is changing the Earth’s climate in ways “unprecedented” in thousands or hundreds of thousands of years, with some of the changes now inevitable and “irreversible,” climate scientists have warned.
Within the next two decades, temperatures are likely to rise by more than 1.5C above pre-industrial levels, breaching the ambition of the 2015 Paris climate agreement, and bringing widespread devastation and extreme weather.

Only rapid and drastic reductions in greenhouse gases in this decade can prevent such climate breakdown, with every fraction of a degree of further heating likely to compound the accelerating effects, according to the International Panel on Climate Change, the world’s leading authority on climate science.
…
António Guterres, the UN secretary general, warned: “[This report] is a code red for humanity. The alarm bells are deafening, and the evidence is irrefutable: greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuel burning and deforestation are choking our planet and putting billions of people at immediate risk.”

He called for an end to new coal plants and to new fossil fuel exploration and development, and for governments, investors and businesses to pour all their efforts into a low-carbon future.
“This report must sound a death knell for coal and fossil fuels, before they destroy our planet,” he said.
…
This report is likely to be the last report from the IPCC while there is still time to stay below 1.5C, added Joeri Rogelj, director of research at the Grantham Institute, Imperial College London, and an IPCC lead author.
“This report shows the closer we can keep to 1.5C, the more desirable the climate we will be living in, and it shows we can stay within 1.5C but only just – only if we cut emissions in the next decade,” he said.
“If we don’t, by the time of the next IPCC report at the end of this decade, 1.5C will be out the window.”

And second, on why this report is so important:

Hundreds of climate scientists, thousands of research studies, eight years of work — building on more than three decades of research before that — have been boiled down in the past fortnight to a single message: we are running out of time.

Extreme weather is taking hold in every part of the planet, the atmosphere and seas are warming at rates unprecedented in human history, and some of the consequences are irrevocable, according to the sixth assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), published on Monday.

Only drastic cuts in greenhouse gas emissions this decade can prevent us from raising global temperatures to a disastrous extent, the scientists have concluded.

The IPCC is the body of the world’s leading climate experts, formed in 1988 and charged with preparing comprehensive reports on the state of our knowledge of the climate.

Its first report in 1990 warned of the potential consequences of rising greenhouse gas emissions, and was key to the forging two years later of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, the parent treaty to the 2015 Paris agreement.

As we stand, it’s tricky.

Also this observation at Quartz:

This IPCC report is the first to incorporate forecasts based on the Shared Socioeconomic Pathways, a series of scenarios produced by scientists to aid their understanding of how political and economic trends might shape the future climate.
In the most optimistic scenario, in which the global community bands together to rapidly — as in, starting today — replace fossil fuels with zero-carbon energy and scale up carbon-capture technology, a 1.5°C limit may still be within reach.
Conversely, in the scenario some scientists dub “Trump World,” in which decarbonization is slow and geopolitical conflict is high, the temperature rise is likely to exceed 3°C.

The divergence in those scenarios vividly illustrates the challenge that awaits politicians at COP26, the global climate summit taking place in Glasgow in November.

In the sense of shitty behavior, we’re most-likely be fucked:

And … cut…

(Illustration out front: ‘A Break in Reality’ by Xetobyte, found here).