By Ilan Kelman, UCL

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

In 1990, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued its first assessment report on the state of climate change science. The synthesis of the sixth assessment report will be released later this year. But we can guess its messages: we are changing the climate with adverse consequences and we must urgently cut emissions. So after all this time, is the IPCC still useful?

To tackle this question, I recently organised a webinar featuring two long-standing IPCC authors, Lisa Schipper and Mark Pelling, who were joined by Silke Beck who has researched the IPCC since 1994 without, like me, ever directly contributing to it. My UCL colleague, prominent climate change researcher Sonja Ayeb-Karlsson chaired.

What is the IPCC?

The IPCC was created by the United Nations. It…