A new report released Wednesday by the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on climate crisis showed that climate change is already having an effect on oceans and ice-filled regions and explained that damages from rising sea levels and melting glaciers are all but certain.

The report laid out that the warming of the climate is killing coral reefs, supercharging monster storms and fueling deadly marine heat waves.

“As a result of excess greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, the ocean today is higher, warmer, more acidic, less productive and holds less oxygen,” Jane Lubchenco, a former administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, said to The Washington Post. “The conclusion is inescapable: The impacts of climate change on the ocean are well underway. Unless we take very serious action very soon, these impacts will get worse — much, much worse.”

The report comes days after world leaders gathered this past weekend in New York for a United Nations Climate Summit in an attempt to urge countries to do more to move away from fossil fuels and toward cleaner forms of energy, like solar or wind.

“The climate emergency is a race we are losing — but it is a race we can win if we change our ways now,” U.N. Secretary General António Guterres told world leaders Tuesday in his latest attempt to incite action, reported by the Post. “Even our language has to adapt: What once was called ‘climate change’ is now truly a ‘climate crisis.'"

Ted Schuur, a permafrost expert at Northern Arizona University who is one of the drafting authors of the report, explained that with the worst effects taking place at locations where few humans live, much of it has been ignored. But with 1.9 billion people and over half of the world’s megacities located in coastal areas, he warns we will not be able to ignore it for long.

“People at the poles are experiencing climate change frequently, much more than the rest of us,” Schuur said to the Post. “But I think that’s in our future. Everybody living outside of these polar regions is going to start having these same effects.”

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change recently released a report on the world’s land and water resources, which showed that we are facing “unprecedented” levels of exploitation and danger to the world's food supply.

United-Nations-Intergovernmental-Panel

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