The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has released a new report that an official from the United Nations is calling a “code red for humanity

The detailed and comprehensive IPCC report reveals that humans are changing the climate at an "unprecedented" rate. The Earth’s average surface temperature is projected to reach 1.5 or 1.6 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels at around 2030. This is 10 years earlier than the IPCC has predicted just three years ago, and at this rate, it will be impossible to keep the global temperature under the limits set by the 2015 Paris Agreement. The report says that it is “unequivocal” that humans are to blame for this global heating trajectory.

In response to the report, United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres is calling for immediate action to remove carbon from the energy sector.

"This report must sound a death knell for coal and fossil fuels, before they destroy our planet," he said in a statement.

"The alarm bells are deafening, and the evidence is irrefutable: greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuel burning and deforestation are choking our planet and putting billions of people at immediate risk.”

But hope is not lost if people around the world act now.

Guterres is urging countries to end all fossil fuel exploration and production and shift towards renewable energy. He is also calling on world leaders to lend financial aid to countries that are already suffering the dire consequences of global heating.

"If we combine forces now, we can avert climate catastrophe," he said. "But, as today's report makes clear, there is no time for delay and no room for excuses."

The IPCC report is the latest statistical proof of the climate crisis, but evidence is occurring all around us. Temperatures are reaching unprecedented highs, forest fires are raging, sea levels are rising, ice sheets are melting, weather patterns are getting more extreme, ocean systems are on the brink of collapsing. This recent information and call to action is the latest alarm bell that humans must not ignore, or it will be too late.