PARIS, March 21 — With the planet facing the “potentially serious consequences” of global warming, UN experts writing 32 years ago urged an indifferent world to take immediate action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.In 1990 the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change produced the first trio of reports in a cycle of climate change assessments — one on the physical science of warming, one on the impacts and one on solutions — that has repeated roughly every six years.
They said cuts to the planet-warming gases that humans were pumping into the atmosphere should be swift and drastic. “Our understanding has been refined over 40 years, but the alarm has been ringing since the first IPCC report,” said Celine Guivarch, one of the authors of the latest IPCC assessment of solutions, set to be published on April 4.