Welcome to Zero. I'm Oscar Boyd. On Monday, yet another dire climate report was published,

and yet again it was published in the middle of a whole set of crises that have dominated the

new cycle. So we wanted to take a moment to recognise the importance of this report that's come out

from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, better known as the IPCC.

I'm here with Akshak Rathi, our usual host late in our podcast you do in London, to talk about it.

Actually, let's start with the basics.

What is the IPCC and what are these reports it produces?

The IPCC was created under the United Nations and it was mandated as a body made up of scientists to produce regular reports that will tell the world about the state of our understanding of climate change.

As these reports have come every seven years or so, our understanding has improved, has become firmer, we know better than ever what causes climate change,

what kind of impacts climate change is going to have at a very granular level, and what we need

to do to address this problem so that we can minimize the impacts and even adapt to the warming

that has already occurred. As a result,

these reports have gotten longer and longer and longer. Right. And today's report is the

culmination of the sixth set of reports. It's called the synthesis report. And it's built upon this

wealth of knowledge that you're talking about, how much scientific

knowledge has gone into this report?

Well, today's report is only 37 pages long.

But that's because it's a summary of the entire sixth assessment report, which is about 10,000

pages long.

That in itself is based on nearly 50,000 scientific studies.

So one way to think about what the IPCC does is it creates the most established and rigorously fact-checked body of knowledge that exists on climate change.

And it gets signed of, at least the summary, by every country on the planet.

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