What’s the truth about the UN’s ‘code red’ climate warning?

Predictably enough, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report has been greeted with hyperbole about fire, flood and tempest. It is ‘code red for humanity,’ according to UN general-secretary Antonio Guterres. ‘This report must sound a death knell for coal and fossil fuels before they destroy our planet.’

As ever with IPCC reports, the content doesn’t live up to the hysterical reviews. If the vision presented in it were the basis of a disaster movie you would want your money back. 

No, it doesn’t say that the German floods were caused by man-made climate change – something implied by much of the press coverage, which used photos of the damage in Rhineland towns to illustrate the publication of the report. What it says – to quote from the ‘summary for policymakers’ – is that ‘Globally averaged precipitation over land has likely increased since 1950, with a faster rate of increase since the 1980s (medium confidence)’ – in other words we think, but we are not all that sure, that the world is experiencing higher rainfall.