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We need to cut global greenhouse gas emissions by more than half over the next decade in order to stave off the worst impacts of climate change, says a blockbuster new report. The next few years represent a crucial crossroads, the international group of scientists said, as the choices we make could make or break our efforts to avert catastrophe.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the world’s leading scientific body on climate change, put out its latest report on Monday. While the world has made some progress in cutting emissions, carbon pollution is outpacing that progress, continuing to rise each year—and the impacts are becoming even more dire. Climate change is reshaping the world and its ecosystems quicker than previous forecasts had predicted. However, there’s still a path forward to reverse the tide—but it’s a “rapidly closing window of opportunity,” the report states.

“The climate time-bomb is ticking,” UN Secretary General António Guterres said in a press call Monday. “But today’s IPCC report is a how-to guide to defuse the climate time-bomb. It is a survival guide for humanity.”

It can seem like news coverage of climate is just an endless series of studies and scientific bad news—but if you’re going to listen to just one report, make it this one. It’ll tell you everything you need to know.

What is the IPCC report?

Every five to seven years, the IPCC, which is composed of hundreds of scientists from around the world, reviews the science on climate change to create a huge analysis of where the world is and where it could go; this is the sixth time the IPCC has done this.

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For this cycle, the IPCC has already put out three installments of this analysis, based on tens of thousands of studies: one on the physical science behind climate change ; one on the impacts climate change is having on the world ; and one on the ways the world could move forward to curb warming . This report is the summary of those three installments, as well as three special reports issued within the same timeframe.

There’s a lot of work that went into this particular report, but the science itself isn’t new. Think of this, rather, as a huge cheat sheet to guide the world on what is going on and what we need to do. It’s what governments and businesses will be—or at least, should be—using to guide their strategies over the next several years.

Okay, so what does this one say about where we’re at?

The world has warmed 1.1 degrees Celsius (2 degrees Fahrenheit) above preindustrial levels, and much of that warming has been “unequivocally caused” by human activity, primarily through the use of fossil fuels, the report states. Shockingly, about 42% of our net historic emissions since 1850 occurred between 1990 and 2019. And while we’ve been able to cut some of these emissions, our overall emissions from energy, industry, transportation, agriculture, and buildings have kept climbing. Average annual emissions between 2010 and 2019 were the highest on record.

This shift has led to “widespread and rapid” changes in the atmosphere, the oceans, and ecosystems across the world. This report notes that the scientific links between rising emissions and heatwaves, rising sea levels, droughts, storms, and heavy precipitation are stronger than ever; these changes are only projected to increase as the planet keeps warming. The fallout from these changes—wildfires, species extinction, the collapse of food systems, natural carbon sinks transforming into carbon emitters—is already happening and will accelerate if we keep on emitting.

We’ve been able to adapt to some of these changes, but we’re quickly hitting our limits. And with every additional increment of warming, the fallout will get worse and worse; some ecosystems have seen so many changes that they are “approaching irreversibility.” Many of the projected changes are more intense and/or would happen quicker than previous IPCC reports had estimated, emphasizing how quickly our continuing addiction to fossil fuels is altering the planet.

“Some future changes are unavoidable and/or irreversible but can be limited by deep, rapid and sustained global greenhouse gas emissions reduction,” the report states. “The likelihood of abrupt and/or irreversible changes increases with higher global warming levels. Similarly, the probability of low-likelihood outcomes associated with potentially very large adverse impacts increases with higher global warming levels.”

Is there any hope for the climate?

Importantly: yes. The report finds that we still have legitimate pathways to staving off disaster. In the report, the IPCC modeled several potential scenarios—known as “pathways”—for how we deal with warming over the next few decades, ranging from taking immediate action to aggressively transitioning to renewable energy to, effectively, doing nothing. Prioritizing equity and justice to help everyone on the planet adapt and live in a climate-changed world will be key in this transition, the report states.

The Paris Agreement, which governments signed in 2015 and which forms the backbone of climate policy, set a bare-minimum goal of limiting heating to 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) by the end of the century, with a stretch goal of keeping warming under 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit). Half a degree might not sound like a lot, but there’s a gulf between the reality of a 2 degree and a 1.5 degree world: with 2 degrees of warming, an additional 65 million people would experience “exceptionally” extreme heatwaves each year , for instance.

It’s still possible to hit that 1.5 degree target. But to keep warming under that level, the report finds, global greenhouse gas emissions would need to peak within the next two years—and even then, we’ll probably still overshoot that target, relying on technologies and natural resources that create negative emissions to bring us back down. To stick to that 1.5 degree target, the report states, our greenhouse gas emissions need to peak by 2025 and CO2 emissions need to be cut 65% by 2035—a new set of goals set out in this report.

Our current setup isn’t helping the problem. The policies in place in the world make it almost certain that we’ll exceed warming by 1.5 during this century and make it more difficult to keep warming below 2 degrees. What’s more, the existing fossil fuel infrastructure we have in place is itself enough to get us to 1.5 degrees of warming; adding in planned new projects, the report says, would blow us past 2 degrees.

If there’s no new science, why is this report important?

Since these reports only come out every five to seven years, the next one is due to start around 2030; the intervening years between now and then, according to this report, will be crucial for righting the ship. Countries will also be submitting their next round of pledges to cut emissions at the 2025 global climate summit; these cuts will be absolutely essential.

Basically, this report is the guidebook for what will form one of humanity’s defining decades: whether or not we can stave off mass catastrophe.

Superhero fatigue seems to be hitting both Marvel and DC hard. Alongside a kind of mid-level audience response to Quantumania (it did good , like it made money, but it wasn’t great), Shazam! Fury of the Gods is likewise underperforming at the box office. While Variety reports that Shazam 2 opened at number 1 this weekend, early reports say that it’s netted about 30 million domestically against the estimated 35-40 million, against an estimated 210 million production/marketing budget. Compare this to Creed III , which had an impressive 100 million opening weekend just last week.

Comparing this opening weekend to the first Shazam! film, which had a 54 million dollar opening, shows a pretty significant slowdown in audience excitement for the film franchise. Shawn Robbins, chief analyist at BoxOffice Pro says that, “It’s a soft start… Comic book films are steadily showing that without an event-level hook, it’s difficult to live up to predecessor performances.”

There’s a lot of reasons why this could be occurring. Less than glowing reviews, a general fatigue for superhero films, a murky marketing campaign, the lack of name-brand superheroes ( Shazam isn’t exactly Superman, or even Aquaman) or even the recent shakeup at DC Studios, now under James Gunn’s purview, could all be a reason for the slowdown at the box office.

Shazam! Fury of the Gods is currently in theaters.

Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel , Star Wars , and Star Trek releases, what’s next for the DC Universe on film and TV , and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who .

I imagine Gizmodo readers will not approve of a Luddite take, but I’m going to risk my skin and wax nostalgic for physical calendars . Do you remember Page-A-Day calendars? Each morning you’d tear a page to reveal the new date and some little reward for waking up—a comic, a vocab word, a brainteaser (!). We used to enjoy advent calendars and sexy firefighters. Today, Google Calendar and Microsoft Outlook, with their sterile and ultra-pragmatic interfaces, have relegated our fun to the obsolescent world of gag gifts. Oh, your calendar client sends automated alerts to all of a meeting’s attendees simultaneously? Sounds efficient, but did it give you a piece of chocolate ?

Today’s puzzle features an under-

Did you miss last week’s puzzle? Check it out here , and find its solution at the bottom of today’s article. Be careful not to read too far ahead if you’re still working on that problem!

Puzzle #3: Calendar Cubes

Two cubes, each with a single digit between 0 and 9 printed on each face, can be arranged in a holder to display any day of the month as a two-digit number (e.g., 25 on Christmas or 04 on American Independence Day). How do these work? If you were tasked with designing two cubes capable of showing 01, 02, 03, …, 30, 31, how would you assign digits to their faces? This might not seem puzzling, until you set out to try. Remember that cubes only have six faces, so you have 12 total spaces to work with.

If you solve this and crave an additional challenge, how would you represent the three-letter month abbreviations (e.g. ‘jan’, ‘feb’, ‘mar’, and so on) with three cubes, in which each face contains a lowercase letter?

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Solve the numeric problem first. The same trick will come in handy if you attempt the more difficult letter version.

The solution and a new puzzle will be posted here next Monday. Put it in your calendar.

Do you know a great puzzle that I should cover here? Send it to me at [email protected]

Solution to Puzzle #2: Reverse Tic-Tac-Toe

Last week , we asked you to sleuth out the past in everybody’s favorite three-in-a-row game.

The tic-tac-toe position above was reached in a game between two flawless players, meaning neither of them ever made a move that would allow their opponent to win by force and neither of them missed an opportunity to force a win themselves. What were the last four moves played?

I’ve numbered the squares for clarity’s sake. The last four moves occurred in cells 6, 4, 8, and 2. Let’s work through the reasoning. X moved last because there are four Xs in the diagram and only three Os. So what was X’s last move? Could X have played in cell 1? Well, if that had been an option, X would have played in cell 9 instead and won the game (remember, the players play flawlessly). So X did not play in cell 1 last, nor did they play in cell 8 by the same reasoning.

The last move was either X in cell 3 or X in cell 6. How can we argue that X did not play in cell 3? Because X still could have forced a win by instead playing in cell 9! If cell 3 were empty, then cell 9 would simultaneously set up a horizontal two-in-a-row and a vertical two-in-a-row. O would be helpless to stop both on their next move. By process of elimination, we have successfully deduced the last move: X in cell 6. Retracting that move, the position looks like this with O having just played:

Now, what was O’s last move? It was not cell 2, because playing in cell 6 instead would have won. So O either played in cell 4 or 5. Determining which requires us to take two more steps backward. Suppose O just played in cell 5. This means the position looked like this, with X having just played:

Does something seem off here? X just moved, but no matter which move of theirs we retract, X could have instead forced a win by playing in cell 9. For example, if X had just played in cell 3, playing in cell 9 instead would have set up winning threats across the diagonal and the lowest row. Feel free to check that X playing in cell 1 or 8 similarly gave up a winning opportunity in cell 9. By process of elimination, we conclude that O played in cell 4 on their third move, and the historical position looked like this:

X couldn’t have just played in cell 1, because cell 9 would have forced a win. Cell 3 can’t be the answer, because cell 7 would have forced a win in that case. So X just played in cell 8. This plants us deep into antiquity, with one more move to unlock:

What did O just play? Suppose O just played in cell 5. Then X could have forced a win on their second move of the game by playing in cell 5 instead of in a corner! For example, if this were the position,

then instead of X playing in cell 3, they should play in cell 5 and the game will continue with O playing in cell 9 (to block the diagonal), and X playing in cell 7, creating an unstoppable winning threat. So O played in cell 5 on their very first move of the game, and our answer is cell 2.

We’ve now discovered the last four moves. That final deduction was a particularly tough one. Some of you may know perfect tic-tac-toe strategy, which says that if X begins the game in a corner, then O must play in the center to avoid losing. Knowing this detail could have made the final step of this puzzle easier, because X only has markings in corner cells so O, being a flawless player, must have played their first move in the center. If you solved it this way, kudos. Your days of memorizing schoolyard game strategy were not for naught… or crosses.

Whew! Detective work taxes the mind. Let us know how you did. And let us know how we’re doing! We would love to hear your feedback as we continue to shape the future of this series.

Denzel Washington is in “final negotiations” to co-star in the Gladiator sequel , per a new news report at Deadline . Paul Mescal is already signed on to the film, and Ridley Scott is returning to direct. Additionally, two vets of the original film , costume designer Janty Yates and production designer Arthur Max are also on board. Yates’ costume design for the original film garnered an Oscar, and Max’s work resulted in a nomination.

Currently, Washington’s role is being kept secret. He and Scott have worked together before, when Washington starred in American Gangster. Deadline states that “after reading the script, sources close to the project said he was excited about the bad-ass role Scott had written with him in mind.”

Russel Crowe ’s Maximus will not be returning. He famously died at the end of the 2000 film, and while

Washington’s role is being kept under wraps.

Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel , Star Wars , and Star Trek releases, what’s next for the DC Universe on film and TV , and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who .