The United Nations Alarming Report on Climate Change
Tuesday, March 19, 2024
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On March 20, 2023, United Nations chief Antonio Guterres says a major new report on climate change is a "survival guide for humanity". Clean energy and technology can be exploited to avoid the growing climate disaster, the report says. But at a meeting in Switzerland to agree their findings, climate scientists warned a key global temperature goal will likely be missed. 

 

BURNING UP JULY HOTTEST MONTH ON RECORD 1

BURNING UP - JULY 2021 -  HOTTEST MONTH ON RECORD

 

 

The latest assessment of climate science is a “code red for humanity,” the head of the United Nations said Monday, as a body of scientists convened by the organization—the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change—warned of the “unequivocal” and in some cases irreversible effects of human influence on the planet. The climate is warming at a pace even faster than previously thought and, without stark emissions cuts, could surpass a crucial temperature threshold “up to a decade sooner than previously thought,” Axios notes. “Unless there are immediate, rapid and large-scale reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, limiting warming to close to 1.5°C or even 2°C will be beyond reach,” the IPCC said in a press release August 9, 2021. As report co-author Linda Mearns described it: “Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide.”

 

 Fire Fighters Sound teh Alarm on Climate Change

Fire Fighters Sound the Alarm on Climate Change Across the World 

 

The 3,949-page report concluded that many of the changes scientists are seeing in the Earth’s climate “are unprecedented over many centuries to many thousands of years” and noted that the responsibility of human activity for “observed changes in extremes such as heatwaves, heavy precipitations, droughts, and tropical cyclones” has intensified since the panel’s last report eight years ago. The latest assessment “for the first time speaks with certainty” about man-made climate change, Bloomberg reports, the escalating consequences of which have been palpable across the planet.

 

Oil Refineries emissions

 

Scientists laid out five possible climate futures, varying based on how much carbon emissions are reduced in the remaining window of time. “Our opportunity to avoid even more catastrophic impacts has an expiration date,” Helen Mountford, vice president of climate and economics for the World Resources Institute, said in a statement regarding the new IPCC report, which “implies that this decade is truly our last chance to take the actions necessary to limit temperature rise.”

 

 floods in undeveloped countries

 

The response from political corners was largely predictable. John Kerry, the U.S. special presidential envoy for climate, said that the assessment “underscores the overwhelming urgency of this moment” and called on “all major economies” to “commit to aggressive climate action during this critical decade.” Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, said in a statement that he hopes the “sobering” report will be “a wake-up call for the world to take action now, before we meet in Glasgow in November for the critical COP26 summit.” U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinkenalso highlighted the upcoming international climate negotiations and called the assessment “a stark reminder that we must let science drive us to action.”

 

 

Climate activist Greta Thunberg poured cold water on much of the posturing, criticism that particularly applies to Johnson. In a video message, Thunberg noted that the report exposes the gap between what politicians say and what they actually do to reduce admission. “We are not holding people in power accountable,” she said. “I hope that this can be a wake-up call.”

 

A Man rides his bicycle in Toa Alta Puerto Rico

A Man rides his bicycle in Toa Alta, Puerto Rico

 

The United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is the keeper of the expert consensus on global warming, issuing a painstaking, authoritative report on the state of the science roughly every five years. The body released its sixth assessment on Monday. As with those before it, the latest appraisal was both alarming and unsurprising. Humans are warming the planet. This warming threatens civilization. The worst effects are avoidable, but the problem gets harder to address the longer world leaders wait.

 

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This essential picture has not changed in decades. Yet scientists’ confidence has. Experts are more certain than ever that dire consequences are coming. For decades, climate change doubters clung to scientists’ acknowledgment that there is some give in their numbers — in particular, a key measure known as “climate sensitivity,” which refers to how much the planet will warm given a doubling of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The U.N. panel had previously offered a wide range of likely scenarios, 1.5 to 4.5 degrees Celsius. Doubters argued that warming might end up reflecting the low end of this range. Why force economic disruption to stave off warming that experts admit might not be as bad as some fear?  This view never took into account the fact that uncertainty works in two directions: Things could also turn out far worse than scientists’ median estimates. Now the United Nations has voided this argument. In its latest report, the panel narrowed its climate sensitivity range to 2.5 to 4 degrees Celsius, ruling out the benign warming scenarios doubters insisted were still possible.

 

pollution climate change

 

On the current emissions trajectory, global temperatures are likely to rise by 2.1 to 3.5 degrees Celsius, blowing past the 1.5 degree threshold scientists warn humanity should not breach. The experts determined that humans have already added enough heat-trapping gases to the atmosphere to push the planet to the 1.5 degree mark. The presence of other types of air pollution, which reflect sunlight, has tempered the warming that would have otherwise occurred. Humanity’s health depends on cutting this air pollution, but doing so will also reveal the true thickness of the greenhouse gas blanket humans have already draped over the planet.

 

Hase due to climate change fires

 

Scientists are also more confident about the likely consequences. If the world warms by 2 degrees Celsius, extreme temperatures that may have occurred twice a century would likely strike every three or four years instead. What had been once-a-decade droughts would arise about every four years. Various effects would compound, with disasters such as heat waves, droughts and wildfires feeding into one another. Coral reefs would disappear. Truly catastrophic consequences, such as disruption of ocean circulation patterns that govern the temperature of entire continents, are possible.

 

Heat wave in summers

 

These findings demand a two-pronged climate strategy designed to plateau warming at 1.5 degrees Celsius. Humans must stop releasing into the air potent short-lived greenhouse gases — among them methane, which wafts from careless oil and gas drilling. The world must also drastically cut the long-term warming drivers, primarily carbon dioxide. The U.N. panel concludes that this rescue scenario is still possible if governments eliminate net greenhouse gas emissions by mid-century. Time, however, is running out.

 

 

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