{"id":319098,"date":"2021-08-09T12:10:01","date_gmt":"2021-08-09T09:10:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/en.buradabiliyorum.com\/acceleration-of-global-warming-code-red-for-humanity\/"},"modified":"2021-08-09T12:10:01","modified_gmt":"2021-08-09T09:10:01","slug":"acceleration-of-global-warming-code-red-for-humanity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/acceleration-of-global-warming-code-red-for-humanity\/","title":{"rendered":"#Acceleration of global warming ‘code red’ for humanity"},"content":{"rendered":"

“#Acceleration of global warming ‘code red’ for humanity<\/strong>”<\/p>\n

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\"The
\n The IPCC report app<\/a>roved by 195 nations shines a harsh spotlight on governments dithering\u00a0in the face of mounting evidence that climate change is an existential crisis.
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We ignored the warnings, and now it’s too late: global heating has arrived with a vengeance and will see Earth’s average temperature reach 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels around 2030, a decade earlier than projected only three years ago, according to a landmark UN assessment published on Monday.<\/p>\n


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The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) bombshell\u2014landing 90 days before a key climate summit desperate to keep 1.5C in play\u2014says the threshold will be breached around 2050, no matter how aggressively humanity draws down carbon pollution.<\/p>\n

Years in the making, the sobering report approved by 195 nations shines a harsh spotlight on governments dithering in the face of mounting evidence that climate change is an existential threat.<\/p>\n

Nature itself has underscored their negligence.<\/p>\n

With only 1.1C of warming so far, an unbroken cascade of deadly, unprecedented weather disasters bulked up by climate change has swept the world this summer, from asphalt-melting heatwaves in Canada, to rainstorms turning China’s city streets into rivers, to untameable wildfires sweeping Greece and California. <\/p>\n

“This report is a reality check,” said Valerie Masson-Delmotte, who co-led hundreds of scientists in reviewing a mountain of published climate science<\/a>.<\/p>\n

“It has been clear for decades that the Earth’s climate is changing, and the role of human influence on the climate system is undisputed.”<\/p>\n

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\n “This report is a reality check,” said Valerie Masson-Delmotte, who co-led hundreds of scientists in reviewing a mountain of published climate science.
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Indeed, all but a tiny fraction of warming so far is “unequivocally caused by human activities,” the IPCC concluded for the first time in its three-decade history.<\/p>\n

The world must brace itself for worse\u2014potentially much worse\u2014to come, the report made clear.<\/p>\n

Invisible threshold<\/b><\/p>\n

Even if the 1.5C target humanity is now poised to overshoot is miraculously achieved, it would still generate heatwaves, rainfall, drought and other extreme weather “unprecedented in the observational record”, it concluded.<\/p>\n

At slightly higher levels of global heating, what is today once-a-century coastal flooding will happen every year by 2100, fuelled by storms gorged with extra moisture and rising seas.<\/p>\n

“This report should send a shiver down the spine of everyone who reads it,” said Dave Reay, director of the Edinburgh Climate Change Institute at the University of Edinburgh, who was not among the authors. <\/p>\n

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\n Number of people vulnerable and exposed to climate change in the world as a consequence of temperature increases.
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“In the unblinking delivery style of the IPCC, it sets out where we are now and where we are headed and climate change: in a hole, and still digging.”<\/p>\n

Another looming danger is “tipping points”, invisible thresholds\u2014triggered by rising temperatures\u2014for irreversible changes in Earth’s climate system. <\/p>\n

Disintegrating ice sheets holding enough water to raise seas a dozen metres; the melting of permafrost laden with double the carbon in the atmosphere; the transition of the Amazon from tropical forest to savannah\u2014these potential catastrophes “cannot be ruled out,” the report cautions.<\/p>\n

Our natural allies in the fight against climate change, meanwhile, are suffering battle fatigue.<\/p>\n

Since about 1960, forests, soil and oceans have steadily absorbed 56 percent of all the CO2 humanity has chucked into the atmosphere\u2014even as those emissions have increased by half.<\/p>\n

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\n Satellite photo and locator map showing wildfires burning north of Yakutsk in Siberia.
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Sliver of hope<\/b><\/p>\n

But these carbon sinks are becoming saturated, according to the IPCC, and the percentage of human-induced carbon they soak up is likely to decline as the century unfolds. <\/p>\n

The IPCC “report is a code red for humanity,” UN Secretary-General<\/a> Antonio Guterres said. <\/p>\n

“The alarm bells are deafening, and the evidence is irrefutable: greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuel burning and deforestation are choking our planet and putting billions of people at immedia<\/a>te risk.”<\/p>\n

The report does offer a sliver of hope for keeping the 1.5C goal alive.<\/p>\n

The IPPC projected the increase in global surface temperature for five emissions scenarios\u2014ranging from wildly optimistic to outright reckless\u2014and identifies best estimates for 20-year periods with mid-points of 2030, 2050 and 2090. <\/p>\n

By mid-century, the 1.5C threshold will be breached across the board\u2014by a 10th of a degree along the most ambitious pathway, and by nearly a full degree at the opposite extreme. <\/p>\n

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\n Members of the Kayapo indigenous group block highway BR163 during a protest in the outskirts of Novo Progresso in Para State, Brazil.
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But under the most optimistic storyline, Earth’s surface will have cooled a notch to 1.4C by century’s end. <\/p>\n

The other long-term trajectories, however, do not look promising.<\/p>\n

Temperature increases by 2090 range from a hugely challenging 1.8C to a catastrophic 4.4C.<\/p>\n

The report’s authors were at pains to emphasise that the 1.5C goal is not all-or-nothing.<\/p>\n

‘Every bit of warming matters’<\/b><\/p>\n

“It is important politically, but it is not a cliff edge where everything will suddenly become very catastrophic,” said lead author Amanda Maycock, director of the Institute for Climate and Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Leeds.<\/p>\n

Ed Hawkins, a professor of climate science at the University of Reading and a lead author, said that “every bit of warming matters.” <\/p>\n

“The consequences get worse and worse as we get warmer and warmer. Every tonne of CO2 matters.”<\/p>\n