On the heels of jaw-dropping heat and ยิงปลา slotxo flooding across three continents, nearly 200 nations gather Monday (Jul 26) to validate a critical UN climate science report 100 days ahead of a political summit charged with keeping Earth liveable.
The world is a different place than in 2014, when the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued its fifth comprehensive assessment of global heating, past and future.
Lingering doubts that warming was gathering pace or almost entirely human in origin, along with the falsely reassuring notion that climate impacts are tomorrow's problem, have since evaporated in the haze of record heat, wildfires and crippling droughts.
Indeed, an unprecedented cascade of lethal weather this summer - Death Valley-like temperatures in western Canada, flash floods across western Europe, people drowning in rain-filled subway carriages in central China - could make 2021 the year that climate predictions become a reality impossible to ignore.
Another milestone since the last IPCC tome: The Paris Agreement has been adopted, setting a collective target of capping the planet's surface temperature at "well below" two degrees Celsius above late-19th century levels.
Carbon pollution from burning fossil fuels, methane leaks and agriculture has driven up the thermometer 1.1 degrees Celsius so far.
The 2015 treaty also tacked on an aspirational limit of 1.5 degrees Celsius, with many parties to the talks assuming it would remain just that - aspirational, and thus easy to set aside.