The governments of the world have spoken on global warming, and the news is (as many of us anticipated) not so good. The IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, for those who are acronym averse) report states to global policymakers exactly what environmentalists and concerned scientists have been saying for quite awhile now: this orb that we live on is definitely heating up, and we humans are pretty much, almost certainly, responsible for it. “Very likely” is how the IPCC puts it, or - to use their even drabber lexicon - it’s “90-percent certain” that greenhouse gasses released by humans are bringing on the heat.

The IPCC, a United Nations program, isn’t exactly known for being alarmist. All 192 member states must approve and sign the report, and plenty (including our own U. S. of A.) are notorious slow-pokes on the whole fossil fuel dilemma. So when the report says that we’re in a tight spot, you can be sure it’s pretty darn squashed. It’s the fourth such report issued by IPCC, the first since 2001, and each one has gotten progressively dire in its diagnosis. The doc, officially a “Summary for Policymakers,” wrangles together all the peer-reviewed (read: legit) scientific studies on global warming/ climate change and bundles up all the findings to make it an easy read for government officials(who should be) tackling the issue. Global Warming for Dummies, if you will.

Still, plenty of environmentalists and climatologists have some beef with the scope and predictions of the IPCC. While rising temperature predictions seem ok (if a touch conservative: 1.4-5.8 degrees Celcius through the century), the anticipated sea-level rise that will result totally ignores the Greenland and Antarctic ice shelves. Huh? Anyone who’s spent any time around a climate-modeling computer (and who hasn’t, really?) will tell you that these frozen masses hold the future of our coastlines in their icy grips.

But, as the IPCC is taken by so many to be the authoritative source of the real science of global warming, this thing is resonating with the masses. Climate skeptics and deniers look to be camped out on some very thin ice.