Short answers, pulled from the story.
The IPCC Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) is the fifth major assessment of climate science produced by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, completed in 2014. It consisted of three Working Group reports and a Synthesis Report, with the final Synthesis Report released on the 2nd of November 2014.
More than 800 authors were selected from approximately 3,000 nominations to contribute to AR5. On the 23rd of June 2010, the IPCC announced a final list of 831 coordinating lead authors drawn from fields including meteorology, physics, oceanography, statistics, engineering, ecology, and economics.
AR5 concluded it was extremely likely, meaning 95 to 100 percent probability, that human influence was the dominant cause of observed global warming between 1951 and 2010. This level of confidence was higher than in the previous assessment report.
AR5 found that atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide had reached levels unprecedented in at least the last 800,000 years. The report also noted that the period from 1983 to 2013 was likely the warmest 30-year period in 1,400 years.
Without new mitigation policies, AR5 projected a global mean temperature increase by 2100 of 3.7 to 4.8 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, with a wider range of 2.5 to 7.8 degrees when climate uncertainty was included. Global surface temperature was likely to exceed 1.5 degrees Celsius relative to the 1850-1900 baseline across most scenarios.
The AR5 Synthesis Report was released on the 2nd of November 2014 specifically to pave the way for negotiations on reducing carbon emissions at the UN Climate Change Conference in Paris during late 2015. UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon also announced plans to convene a heads-of-state meeting in 2014 to work toward a climate treaty, citing the report's findings.