Climate 'countdown clock' report launched ahead of key UN talks

PARIS, France — Top scientists have launched a yearly report series to plug knowledge gaps ahead of crunch climate talks, with their global warming "countdown clock" vying for the attention of world leaders and ordinary citizens alike.

In a year marked by devastating extreme weather events, Dubai will host key UN negotiations starting on November 30 aimed at curbing greenhouse gas emissions and helping the developing world deal with climate impacts.

The UN scientific advisory panel in charge of summarising climate change research has produced comprehensive and authoritative assessment reports in cycles of five to seven years since 1988.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has warned the world is on course to cross the key warming threshold of 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels in the early 2030s.

But the lengthy time lag between its gargantuan reports -- drawing from studies that may already have been superseded by new findings -- has sparked concern that backward-looking research is less useful for policymakers responding to a fast-moving climate emergency.

So 50 scientists, many lead IPCC contributors, teamed up to produce a paper on climate change in 2022 to update key metrics from the IPCC report.

"We cannot afford to wait" for the next IPCC assessment report in this "decade of action", said Peter Thorne, a professor of physical geography at Maynooth University in Ireland and co-author of the new report.

"If we are flying blind without information, we're going to make bad choices," he told AFP.

The first peer-reviewed report of the series, published in the journal Earth System Science Data in June, said human-induced warming reached 1.26C in 2022 and increased at an "unprecedented rate" of more than 0.2C per decade in the 2013-2022 period.

These were key updates to the IPCC report published less than a year earlier.

It also said there was evidence that increases in greenhouse gas emissions have slowed, and that a change of direction could be observed in future updates.

"This is an annual timely reminder" of climate change after the initial media frenzy around IPCC findings fades, said co-author Chris Smith, of Britain's