Thank you, Nancy.
As they said, I'm a senior research scientist and manager of the Canadian centre for climate modelling and analysis, located in Victoria. I was also elected vice-chair of working group I of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC, in 2015. I'm the only Canadian on the IPCC bureau.
My research over the past 25 years has been in the area of development and application of global earth system models. These are physically based computer simulations of the global climate, which include representations of the atmosphere, ocean, ice and land surface, as well as interactions between the biosphere and carbon cycle. We use these models to understand how the climate system operates, why it has changed in the past, and how it will change in the future.
In my capacity as an IPCC vice-chair, I was involved in the selection of authors and served as review editor of chapter 2 of the “Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5°C”. This particular chapter was the one that assessed mitigation pathways compatible with 1.5°C warming. By way of background, this special report was initiated as part of the Paris Agreement, wherein the IPCC was invited to prepare a special report on the impacts of global warming of 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels and related global greenhouse gas emission pathways.
The IPCC released this report in early October 2018 at an approval plenary in Incheon, South Korea. The IPCC report preparation process is very rigorous, involving the selection of an international author team, four lead author meetings, and three rounds of reviews that involve international experts and governments. The report itself draws upon peer-reviewed scientific publications, some 6,000 of which are cited in this report.
This special report provides quantitative information about the greenhouse gas emission pathways that would be consistent with limiting warming to 1.5°C and to 2°C, as well as an assessment of the difference in climate-related impacts between these two levels of warming.
It's important to understand that, in order to stabilize global temperature at any level, global net carbon dioxide emissions must reach net zero. That is, the global sum of emissions and removals must equal zero. As long as emissions are positive, temperature will continue to increase. Global mean temperature is currently at 1°C above pre-industrial levels.
The analysis provided in this special report shows that limiting warming to 1.5°C would require rapid reductions in global greenhouse gas emissions with a decline of about 45% relative to 2010 levels by 2030 and reaching net zero around 2050.
I'll now pass it back to Nancy.