The United Nations said on Monday that the world will cross the key 1.5 degree Celsius global warming limit in about a decade.
In the final instalment of a major series of reports, the UN's climate advisory panel has urged drastic reductions in global warming emissions, in a crucial decade in human history.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's message is that while humanity has driven the planet to the precipice of climate catastrophe, there is still time to steer global temperatures to within relatively safe limits.
The IPCC's work will be the basis of intensive political and economic negotiations in the coming years, starting with the UN COP 28 climate negotiations in Dubai later this year, according to the report's summary for policymakers.
The 36-sided summary for policymakers - a synthesis of six major reports since 2018 from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change - IPCC - is a brutal reminder that humanity has the tools to prevent climate catastrophe, but it is still not putting them to use.
The world is currently setting to reach 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels - considered a safer limit to warming - in the early 2030 s, which will ratchet up the severity of the impacts in the near future.
The IPCC's head said it was not too late to change things, but it was a message of hope that we have know-how, technology, tools, financial resources, everything needed to overcome the climate problems that we have known for so long, Hoesung Lee told AFP in a video interview.
There is a lack of a political will to resolve these issues once and for all. The IPCC said the world is currently poised to reach 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels - the more ambitious and safer target of the Paris Agreement in the early 2030s - which will ratchet up the severity of the impacts in the near future.
Climate activist Greta Thunberg said that the people in power still live in a denial and actively move in the wrong direction will eventually be seen and understood as the unprecedented betrayal it is.
The world has seen a crescendo of deadly and destructive extreme weather at just under 1.2 degrees Celsius of warming so far. The most vulnerable populations have already been hit hard.
Friederike Otto, a climate scientist at Imperial College London and lead author of the report, told AFP the warmest years we've had to date will be among the coolest in a generation.