After spending hundreds of hours in virtual meetings to complete this week’s major UN climate report, scientists Piers Forster and Joeri Rogelj celebrated in a way their peers could not: by hugging.

Britain-based Forster had been weary of the isolation during the Covid-19 pandemic and invited his co-author to work alongside him in his Harrogate kitchen as they worked with other scientists around the world to thrash out the final version of the report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Being together for the last stretch of a three-year effort “made it more fun,” said Forster, a climate physicist at the University of Leeds.

“My neighbours must have thought us mad though, hearing ‘Thank you madam co-chair,’ in response to questions from St Kitts, India, or the kingdom of Saudi Arabia, coming through at 4am.”

When the more than 700 scientists and government delegates finally...