UN Climate Report: Not everything is going well, but not everything is lost

Today United The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has been released alarming new report on the state of the climate: 14,000 scientific literatures synthesized by hundreds of experts. It’s a complete statement that explains how scientists set fire to the planet: how hot and hot it will be, how much polar ice is melting, how droughts and storms are worsening, how severe is the path? looking ahead – unless we take drastic and immediate steps to stop charging the atmosphere with carbon.

“We have been warming the world for decades, but this report says recent climate change is widespread, rapid and rapid, unprecedented for thousands of years,” Ko Barrett, IPCC vice president and chief adviser at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, said in a report on Sunday. at his press conference. “The basis is that in the absence of immediate, rapid and substantial reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, limiting heating to 1.5 degrees C or 2.7 Fahrenheit is not available.”

That limitation is a positive goal Paris Climate Agreement: Maintain an average global temperature of up to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels and avoid overheating by 2 degrees. The new report states that the temperature has already risen 1.1 degrees, and that if things don’t change in the early 2030s and 2030s it is on track to hit 1.5.

That’s a significant update previous IPCC report which predicted that by 2040 the planet would reach 1.5 milestones, says climate scientist Zeke Hausfather and director of climate and energy at the Breakthrough Institute, who did not participate in the report. “We’re also going through 2 degrees in the early 2040s and early 2050s somewhere in high-emission scenarios,” he says, citing one of the five results modeled in the new report.

Why is this middle grade so important? “There’s a big difference between 1.5 and 2,” in terms of distortion droughts, heat waves, storms, floods, melted ice, and sea ​​level rise, says Janos Pasztor, executive director of the Carnegie Climate Governance Initiative and former UN Assistant Secretary-General for Climate Change, was not involved in the report. “They both make it worse. And it gets beyond 2 many, many worse. And, of course, there are opportunities to move in that direction. “

The report outlines projections of what would happen in five different scenarios of greenhouse gas emissions: these represent the future of humanity producing different levels of carbon, from very low to very high. (In the lowest scenario, by 2050, emissions will drop to zero and continue to fall. Most of the time, they double in that year.) In other words, it is predicting what the climate will be like depending on the speed of our civilization. decarbonize.

The report’s color-coded graphs show what would happen to global temperatures and precipitation rates, depending on how warm the climate is, and how many regions of the world have experienced increases in extreme heat, precipitation, and drought. (Tip: almost all of them.)