Leaked IPCC Draft Struggles with Messaging

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has come under fire due to a leaked draft of part two of its Sixth Assessment Report (AR6). The formerly secret document reveals that the panel’s first attempts to analyze climate change impacts had devolved into a chaotic tangle of despair and swears.

Titled simply “F--- This,” the draft working-group report on impacts, adaptation, and vulnerability paints a hopeless and foul-mouthed portrait of both the present and the future. Choice passages from the report include:

•  Widespread, pervasive impacts to ecosystems, people, settlements, and infrastructure have resulted from observed increases … ah, screw this, clearly no one is reading these things anyway.

• Roughly half of the world’s population currently experience severe water scarcity for at least some part of the year! Do you sh--heads even want potable water?

• Wildfires, in many regions, have affected ecosystems and species, people and their built assets, economic activity, and health. Burn, baby, burn!

The leaked draft also includes advice for living in a post-apocalyptic hellscape:

• Adverse climate impacts can reduce the availability of financial resources by incurring losses and damages and through impeding national economic growth, so stockpile weapons and hoard petrol while you still bloody can.

• All these trends have impacted ecosystems, food security, water resources, water quality, livelihoods, health and well-being, infrastructure, transportation, tourism, and recreation, as well as the culture of human societies. Better learn to eat your own sh--.

• Deteriorating climates often exacerbate accumulating weaknesses in social systems to which population growth and urban expansion contribute. Please, FFS, stop popping out the motherf---ing babies!

António Guterres, secretary-general of the United Nations, said in remarks at a press conference that he had “no problem whatsoever” with the tone and content of the leaked draft. “Nearly half of humanity is living in the danger zone—now. Many ecosystems are at the point of no return—now. Unchecked carbon pollution is forcing the world’s most vulnerable on a frog march to destruction—now,” he said, adding, “Would it kill you to get your a-- on a g-d---- bike? Wake the f--- up!”