Five Times Faster

Leaders and policymakers underestimate the climate change crisis.

Even leaders who accept the science behind climate change – and whose countries are major contributors to greenhouse gas emissions – often underestimate the risk climate change poses. Those same officials often resist pursuing proper risk assessments for climate change. They tend to think they don’t need a proper risk assessment because they already accept climate science, because accurate risk assessments portend an apocalyptic future, and because they assume such an assessment must already exist. 

A proper risk assessment could lead to concrete policies limiting greenhouse gas emissions that would benefit both human health and the economy. Establishing such policies will be difficult and will require money and political effort.

Politicians, policymakers, scientists, and citizens must invest in research on climate change’s worst impacts.

Since 1988, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has advised policymakers on climate science. Its 2013 report found that people knew little about climate change’s worst...