The IPCC is formed

During the nineteenth century, scientists were more concerned about Ice Ages being the result of changing climate temperature, rather than global warming. Nobody really thought the world’s climate could warm as a result of human impact.

It wasn’t until after a conference in the Austrian town of Villach in 1985 that the Advisory Group on Greenhouse Gases (AGGG) was set up to monitor the causes of global warming. Three years later, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was formed and in 1990, the now globally renowned body issued its first report which stated that global warming was real and was already happening. At the time though, it wasn’t known whether this was a result of man-made or natural causes.

By the 4th IPCC report, published in 2007, the findings were reasonably firm that the cause of global warming was man-made and when the 5th report was published in 2014, the IPCC started recommending carbon “budgets” to limit the amount of carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere.

In 2020, echoing the work of Svante Arrhenius a century before, the IPCC said that to keep global warming to a 1.5 degree celcius increase from pre-industrial levels, we only have another 400 gigatonnes of CO2 equivalent we can release into the atmosphere. Currently, we release around 40-50 gigatonnes every year, so we have to reduce the amount of emissions dramatically in order to keep to within the 1.5 degrees celcius limit.