July 27, 2021 PARIS: Nearly 200 nations started online negotiations on Monday to validate a UN science report that will anchor autumn summits charged with preventing climate catastrophe on a planetary scale. “The report that you are going to finalise is going to be very important worldwide,” World Meteorological Organisation head Petteri Taalas told some 700 delegates by Zoom.The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) assessment “is critical for the success of the Glasgow climate conference in November,” he said. Record-smashing heatwaves, floods and drought across three continents in recent weeks—all amplified by global warming—have added pressure for decisive action.“For years we have warned that all of this was possible, that all of this was coming,” the UN’s climate chief, Patricia Espinosa, said in a prepared statement. A key G20 summit with climate on the agenda is slated for late October. The world is a different place since the IPCC’s last comprehensive overview in 2014 of global heating, past and future.