This is Number 12 in our Climage Change series of scientific papers and articles. It is depressing reading. We are making the planet inhospitable fo our children’s children, and wiping out hundreds of species in the food chain. [Words in blue link to additional information.]
Scientists have delivered a “final warning” on the climate crisis, as rising greenhouse gas emissions push the world to the brink of irrevocable damage that only swift and drastic action can avert. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), made up of the world’s leading climate scientists, set out the final part of its mammoth sixth assessment report last Monday. The comprehensive review of human knowledge of the climate crisis took hundreds of scientists eight years to compile and runs to thousands of pages, but boiled down to one message: act now, or it will be too late.
The UN secretary general, António Guterres, said: “This report is a clarion call to massively fast-track climate efforts by every country and every sector and on every timeframe. Our world needs climate action on all fronts: everything, everywhere, all at once.”
In sober language, the IPCC set out the devastation that has already been inflicted on swathes of the world. Extreme weather caused by climate breakdown has led to increased deaths from intensifying heatwaves in all regions, millions of lives and homes destroyed in droughts and floods, millions of people facing hunger, and “increasingly irreversible losses” in vital ecosystems.
Monday’s final instalment, called the synthesis report, is almost certain to be the last such assessment while the world still has a chance of limiting global temperature rises to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels, the threshold beyond which our damage to the climate will rapidly become irreversible. Kaisa Kosonen, a climate expert at Greenpeace International, said: “This report is definitely a final warning on 1.5C. If governments just stay on their current policies, the remaining carbon budget will be used up before the next IPCC report [due in 2030].”
More than 3bn people already live in areas that are “highly vulnerable” to climate breakdown, the IPCC found, and half of the global population now experiences severe water scarcity for at least part of the year. In many areas, the report warned, we are already reaching the limit to which we can adapt to such severe changes, and weather extremes are “increasingly driving displacement” of people in Africa, Asia, North, Central and South America, and the south Pacific.
All of those impacts are set to increase rapidly, as we have failed to reverse the 200-year trend of rising greenhouse gas emissions, despite more than 30 years of warnings from the IPCC, which published its first report in 1990.
The world heats up in response to the accumulation of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, so every year in which emissions continue to rise eats up the available “carbon budget” and means much more drastic cuts will be needed in future years.
Yet there is still hope of staying within 1.5C, according to the report. Hoesung Lee, the chair of the IPCC, said: “This synthesis report underscores the urgency of taking more ambitious action and shows that, if we act now, we can still secure a livable sustainable future for all.”
Temperatures are now about 1.1C above pre-industrial levels, the IPCC found. If greenhouse gas emissions can be made to peak as soon as possible, and are reduced rapidly in the following years, it may still be possible to avoid the worst ravages that would follow a 1.5C rise. Richard Allan, a professor of climate science at the University of Reading, said: “Every bit of warming avoided due to the collective actions pulled from our growing, increasingly effective toolkit of options is less worse news for societies and the ecosystems on which we all depend.”
Guterres called on governments to take action to reduce emissions by investing in renewable energy and low-carbon technology. He said rich countries must try to reach net zero greenhouse gas emissions “as close as possible to 2040”, rather than waiting for the 2050 deadline most have signed up to.
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Grouse Beater 
Reblogged this on Ramblings of a now 60+ Female.
Depressing reading indeed.
I have no children of my own but my siblings have children and their children have children. It’s them I worry for and their future world. I listened to a programme the other week where concerns were being expressed about the massive amount of junk orbiting our planet. More “rubbish” abandoned by mankind, more trash dumped by us. Not content with destroying our own planet we’re even happy to move beyond that.
Thanks for posting this, GB.
It is utterly depressing, GB. Although the bulk of the pollution has come since industrialisation, the mass pollution of our land, waterways and seas has happened within a very short period of rampant consumerism, from the late 1970s onwards until it has now reached a crescendo (so much for it all being the fault of the Boomers and GenX-ers).
Privatisation and unfettered capitalism exacerbated the problem 100-fold. Our only hope, I believe, lies in innovation and invention: the means to neutralise plastics and a return to repairing items instead of introducing more and more disposable consumer goods. Instead of our universities harnessing science to the cart of consumerist ideology, we need to use it to clean up the existing mess, not adding to it.
It is interesting, is it not, that cryogenics and building rockets appear to obsess our billionaires who seem to want to live forever and care not a jot about ordinary people. They intend to escape, I think, placing their cryogenic coffins aboard rockets to carry them to a new planet that they can them colonise and destroy as they plot to make more money than any person could ever spend in a thousand lifetimes.
Delusion and fantasy are always with us, as are the obscenely rich. They forget about the Egyptian tombs and the plundering and destruction of the sarcophaguses that the Ancient Egyptians believed would carry them into the next life! New generations do not care a fig for the beliefs of venal old men.