Screenshot. Katowice former coat of arms. Wikicommons. Some rights reserved.An important climate meeting takes place on 3-14 December in Katowice, a symbolic location in that the city has long been the heartland of Poland's well established coal-mining industry. This latest session of the Conference of Parties to the United Nations International Panel on Climate Change – COP24 is the useful shorthand – follows the publication on 8 October of a report from the IPCC's scientific advisors.
By the standards of the bland, compromise-driven texts that often emanate from international organisations, the IPPC's report is remarkable for its pungent flavour. It is clear that the climate-science community is determined to tell the world just how serious the problem really is.
A recent contribution to the same debate by another organisation, the Oxford Research Group, argues that, to reflect the true picture of the times, climate change should now be routinely termed climate disruption. There needs to be a massive acceleration in efforts to control the burning of fossil carbon (coal, oil, gas), says the ORG:
