It's All Our Fault - New UN Climate Change Report Says Humans Are Responsible For Global Warming

What has the extreme heat in Canada in common with floods in Germany and fires in Greece?

The answer can be only one: they are all caused by the global warming. 

Today, the UN published a new report on climate change prepared by more than 200 scientists. 

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has 3,000-plus-pages summarising the latest scientific information about global warming.

"Climate change is not a problem of the future; it's here and now and affecting every region in the world," said Dr Friederike Otto from the University of Oxford and one of the IPCC authors.

Although climate change is no longer distant to anyone as it has affected people living on all continents in recent years, the report is the first of its kind to blame humans for the disastrous state of the Earth. 

"I think there's not one single kind of new surprise that comes out; it's the over-arching solidness that makes this the strongest IPCC report ever made," Prof Arthur Petersen, from University College London (UCL), told BBC News.

The shocking report shows that, without any doubt, that the climate crisis and suffering of our planet is caused by humans and the greenhouse gases they have released into the atmosphere.

Scientists say that the temperatures around the world have risen by 1.1 degrees Celsius since the 19th century. The numbers are reaching their highest in over 100,000 years, and natural forces are responsible for only a tiny part of that increase. 

The report indicates that almost all of the warming that has occurred since pre-industrial times was caused by releasing carbon dioxide and methane from humans burning fossil fuels - coal, oil, wood and gas. 

The IPCC report concludes that ice melt and sea-level rise are already accelerating. From storms and floods to extreme heat waves, wild weather events will be more frequent and more severe. 

According to the study, further warming of the climate is already "locked in." It is dependent on the greenhouse gases humans have already released into the atmosphere. That means that even if we stop our negative impact now, the consequences of emissions will be present for centuries to come, and some changes are even "irreversible."

The IPCC report also shows that the seas will continue to rise, and in the future, we will see catastrophic ice sheet collapses and the abrupt slowdown of ocean currents, changing the weather in many places of the world. The report says the seas could rise up to 2m by the end of this century and up to 5m by 2150, and these figures y can't be ruled out.

In 2015 almost all countries signed up to the Paris climate agreement, which aims to limit global warming to an increase of 2 degrees Celsius by the year 2100 - though the ideal increase would be no more than 1.5 degrees Celsius. The report concludes the world will see an increase of 1.5-degrees already in the next decade, sooner than any previous predictions. 

That doesn't mean there's no hope. But we must act now! 

Scientists suggest that we could help reduce the planet to cool down through "negative emissions," which means absorbing more carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere than we add, using clean technology and planting trees.