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Leader and Environment

Methane's climate impact was just one truth finally accepted at COP26

1 December 2021

New Scientist. Science news and long reads from expert journalists, covering developments in science, technology, health and the environment on the website and the magazine.

REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque via Alamy

One of the positives to come out of last month’s COP26 climate summit in Glasgow was official recognition of the central role that climate science must play both in understanding and solving the problem. That might seem an odd thing to say – surely science has always been at the heart of the negotiations? Sadly, it hasn’t. At COP24 in Poland in 2018, for example, a report on the impacts of 1.5°C of global warming – specially commissioned from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) for the meeting – was merely “noted” in the final text.

On that front, the newly…

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