It’s bad news folks, but maybe this new climate change report will galvanise some real action

It’s easy to become numb to stories about climate change. The headlines become more and more dramatic, the conclusions more terrifying, but it’s such a big, unwieldy topic, and who has time to be constantly worried about environmental Armageddon?

Hailed by the scientific community as a true game changer, a moment for the history books, a new climate report from the UN may have what it takes to pierce this climate apathy.

It’s not because the conclusions are particularly new. As the report is based on thousands of existing scientific studies, followers of environmental news will already be familiar with stories of coral dying, sea ice melting and Pacific islanders forced from their ancestral homes.

But the conclusions of this report seem particularly hard-hitting. Firstly because everything – from melting ice to dying animals – is presented in one place, but secondly because the outcome is so straightforward. We can avoid catastrophic climate change, they say, but it’s going to be really, really hard.

The report has essentially come about because, despite being a regarded as an impressive feat of international diplomacy, the 2015 Paris climate agreement is a bit vague. It set a target of limiting global warming to "well below 2C above pre-industrial levels” while also “pursuing efforts” for more ambitious reductions of 1.5C.

Getting the 1.5C bonus target tacked on the end was billed as a major achievement at the time – largely the result of hard negotiating by leaders from places like the Marshall Islands, who were genuinely scared they wouldn’t have nations to lead any more if warming crept up to 2C.

As not a lot was known at the time about the comparative impact of 1.5 or 2C of warming, the UN commissioned a report to spell it out.

Well now the results are in, and thanks to the voluntary efforts of thousands of scientists who have contributed to the work over the past two years, we now have a clear picture of what life will be like on our planet beyond 1.5C.

It’s not good news. We are looking at millions of people displaced by rising tides, thousands of animal and plant species losing their homes to scorching heat and – perhaps starkest of all – virtually all the coral on Earth dying.

As we are currently on track to reach not 1.5, not 2, but 3C of warming by the end of the century, it’s clear that there is some serious work to do.

The baton will now be passed to politicians. The evidence is there, and they have been given a straightforward plan of action: less fossil fuel (and then none at all), more renewable energy; stop cutting down trees and start planting new ones.

Of course nothing is ever that simple, and the report comes at a difficult moment for climate politics. The Trump administration has famously said the US will pull out of the Paris climate agreement, and Australia is showing a similar unwillingness to let go of fossil fuels. Now the Brazilian presidential candidate Jair Bolsonaro has threatened he will join Mr Trump and pull out of the agreement too.

But all is not lost. Despite having a “climate vandal” for a president, American climate scientists continue to lead the world and state leaders such as California governor Jerry Brown pursue their own emissions-cutting targets. In the UK, there has already been plenty of talk on both sides of the political divide about achieving “net zero” emissions by the middle of the century – a commitment recommended in the UN report.

This December, a UN meeting in Poland will attempt to take the lessons from this report and translate them into a rulebook for the countries of the world to cut their emissions.

When heatwaves scorched Europe this summer, many said it marked a turning point as people started to see climate change unfolding before their eyes. Momentum is certainly building, the question that remains is whether it will be enough.