- UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said that a blockbuster climate science report “must sound the death knell for coal, oil and natural gas.”
- Guterres called the IPCC’s assessment “the red code of mankind”sex”.
- This thought-provoking report, approved by 195 countries, is strongly concerned about the government’s hesitation in the face of growing evidence that climate change is an existential threat.
We ignore the warning, it is too late: according to a landmark assessment by the United Nations, global warming has arrived, and by 2030 the average temperature of the earth will be 1.5 degrees Celsius higher than the pre-industrial level, ahead of the forecast three years ago Decade released on Monday.
The blockbuster of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which landed 90 days before the critical climate summit that desperately wants to keep 1.5C working, said that no matter how aggressively humans reduce carbon pollution, this threshold will remain It will be broken around 2050.
Over the years, this thought-provoking report approved by 195 countries has made governments hesitate in the face of mounting evidence that climate change is an existential threat.
Nature itself emphasized their negligence.
So far, the temperature has only increased by 1.1 degrees Celsius. This summer, a series of fatal and unprecedented weather disasters exacerbated by climate change swept the world, from the heat wave of melting asphalt in Canada to the torrential rains that turned the streets of Chinese cities into rivers, to the difficult Tame wildfires swept Greece and California.
“This report is a test of reality,” said Valerie Masson-Delmotte, who has reviewed a large number of published climate sciences with hundreds of scientists.
“For decades, the earth’s climate has been changing, and human influence on the climate system is indisputable.”
In fact, so far, except for a small amount of warming, all warming is “clearly caused by human activities”, and the IPCC has come to a conclusion for the first time in its 30-year history.
The report makes it clear that the world must prepare for a worse situation—possibly worse—is coming.
Invisible threshold
It concluded that even if the 1.5C target that mankind is now preparing to exceed the standard is miraculously achieved, it will still produce heat waves, rainfall, droughts and other extreme weather “unprecedented in the observational record.”
If the level of global warming is slightly higher, then by 2100, today’s once-in-a-hundred-year coastal floods will occur every year, driven by storms full of extra moisture and rising sea levels.
Dave Reay, director of the Edinburgh Institute for Climate Change at the University of Edinburgh, said: “This report should make everyone who read it shudder.” He is not one of the authors.
“In the IPCC’s unwavering delivery style, it explains where we are now, where we are going, and climate change: in a hole, still digging.”
Another imminent danger is the “critical point”, that is, the invisible threshold triggered by the rise in temperature, leading to irreversible changes in the Earth’s climate system.
The ice sheet disintegrated, and the amount of water was enough to lift the sea more than ten meters; the permafrost melted and the atmosphere contained twice as much carbon; the report warned that the Amazon transitioned from tropical forests to prairies-these potential disasters “cannot be ruled out.”
At the same time, our natural allies in tackling climate change are suffering from combat fatigue.
Since about 1960, forests, soils, and oceans have steadily absorbed 56% of the total carbon dioxide emitted by humans into the atmosphere—even if these emissions have increased by half.
The death knell of fossil fuels
However, according to the IPCC, these carbon sinks are becoming saturated, and as the century unfolds, the percentage of anthropogenic carbon they absorb may decline.
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said that the IPCC “reports are the red code of mankind.”
“The alarm bells are deafening, and the evidence is irrefutable: the greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuel burning and deforestation are killing our planet and putting billions of people at immediate risk.”
The Portuguese diplomat said that maintaining a temperature target of 1.5 degrees Celsius means that no new coal-fired power plants can be built, and that by 2040, all energy generated from coal must come from renewable energy sources.
At least for the past 2 million years, the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is currently at its highest level, and the levels of methane and nitrous oxide are at their highest levels 800,000 years ago.
Despite the record drop in carbon pollution driven by pandemic restrictions last year, the IPCC found that the rate of greenhouse gas accumulation “has not significantly decreased.”
Guterres called on world leaders to ensure that the COP26 climate summit held in November can increase emissions reduction efforts and provide funds for countries that are already responding to the effects of global warming.
“If we unite now, we can avoid climate disasters,” he said.
“But, as today’s report shows, there is no time to delay and no excuses.”
A ray of hope
The report does provide a glimmer of hope for maintaining the 1.5C target.
The IPPC predicted the increase in global surface temperature in five emission scenarios—from extreme optimism to utterly reckless—and determined the best estimate over a 20-year period, with the midpoints being 2030, 2050, and 2090.
By the middle of this century, the 1.5C threshold will be fully broken-breaking 10 degrees along the most ambitious path, and almost 1 degree at the opposite extreme.
But in the most optimistic storyline, by the end of this century, the surface of the earth will cool down by a notch to 1.4C.
However, other long-term trajectories do not look optimistic.
By 2090, the temperature rise will range from a challenging 1.8C to a catastrophic 4.4C.
The authors of the report took pains to emphasize that the goal of 1.5C is not all or nothing.
“Every bit of warming is important”
Lead author Amanda Maycock, director of the Institute of Climate and Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Leeds, said: “This is politically important, but it’s not the edge of a cliff. Everything will suddenly become very catastrophic.”
Ed Hawkins, professor of climate science at the University of Reading and lead author, said, “Every point of warming is important.”
“As we get warmer, the consequences will become more serious. Every ton of carbon dioxide is important.”
According to a draft seen by Agence France-Presse, Part 2 of the IPCC assessment-on impact-shows how climate change will fundamentally reshape life on Earth in the coming decades. It is scheduled to be published in February. Part 3 will be released in March and will focus on ways to reduce carbon in the atmosphere.
The focus will now shift to the political arena, where a series of uninterrupted ministerial meetings and summits, including the G20 key meeting in October, will lead to the COP26 United Nations Climate Conference hosted by the United Kingdom in Glasgow.
Starting from the 1.5C target, countries differed on many basic issues.
John Kerry, the US President’s special envoy for climate change, told the New Yorker last week that China, India, Brazil, South Africa and Russia are enthusiastic about this. At the same time, rich countries have seriously missed the deadline to provide developing countries with funds to achieve a green economy and adapt to climate change that is already underway.
“The new IPCC report is not an exercise, but a final warning that the empty promise bubble is about to burst,” said Salem Hooker, director of the Dhaka International Center for Climate Change and Development.
“Continuing to procrastinate is suicidal and financially unreasonable.”
