Extreme weather warning us of much more catastrophic climate damage to come--UN study
The UN's sixth assessment report of the state of the planet was grim. Do we really still have time to save ourselves?
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On a day when Gulf state residents are deciding whether it’s safe to crawl down from their roofs and attics where they’ve taken refuge against a giant climate-change enhanced hurricane and flooding and people in Lake Tahoe are abandoning their homes in caravans in the face of climate-change enhanced unchecked wildfires, it is probably worth asking: Just how screwed are we anyway?
Certainly, 2021 will be remembered as the year that extreme weather events stopped being some vague whisper about future climate warming and moved into mainstream media (and, hopefully, wide public) consciousness as something that is happening now, is fueled virtually entirely by greenhouse gases we humans pump into the atmosphere, is causing incalculable property and people damage and is going to get worse and more frequent if we don’t get it under control is the next couple of decades.
It’s hard to be cheerful about a major climate study whose most hopeful finding is that “we’re not totally doomed yet” but that appears to be the case with the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel (IPCC) Sixth Assessment report released a couple of weeks ago. Eight years in the making, the latest IPCC report is basically a global checkup of the current health of the planet based on an exhaustive review of the scientific literature and extensive computer scenario modeling by more than 250 of the world’s top climate scientists from around the globe and signed off on by 185 countries.
UN Secretary-General António Guterres’ statement of Aug 9 on the report on the physical science basis of the sixth assessment, captured the urgency of the task ahead:
Today’s IPCC Working Group 1 report is a code red for humanity. 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 immediate risk. Global heating is affecting every region on Earth, with many of the changes becoming irreversible.
The internationally agreed threshold of 1.5°C is perilously close. We are at imminent risk of hitting 1.5°C in the near term. The only way to prevent exceeding this threshold is by urgently stepping up our efforts and pursuing the most ambitious path.
We must act decisively now to keep 1.5°C alive. We are already at 1.2°C and rising. Warming has accelerated in recent decades. Every fraction of a degree counts. Greenhouse‑gas concentrations are at record levels. Extreme weather and climate disasters are increasing in frequency and intensity. That is why this year’s United Nations climate conference in Glasgow is so important.
Gutteres called on all nations, especially the G20 and other major emitters, to “join the net-zero emissions coalition and reinforce their commitments with credible, concrete and enhanced nationally determined contributions and policies before COP26 in Glasgow.”
The key findings of the new IPCC report will probably not shock climate scientists or people who follow the field closely but they should be a strong kick in the butt to politicians and wishful thinking bureaucrats who are still viewing the coming calamity as somebody else’s problem that will happen sometime in the future.
IPCC Report Key points:
The global surface temperature was 1.09C higher in the decade between 2011-2020 than between pre-indus.rial times— 1850-1900
The past five years have been the hottest on record since 1850. July was the hottest month on record.
The report says that it’s "virtually certain" that hot extremes including heatwaves have become more frequent and more intense since the 1950s, while cold extremes have become less frequent and less severe.
What this means is that things are going to get a lot scarier and more bonkers with the weather until we get down to net-zero and can begin reducing the earth’s temperature. Oceans will continue to warm and become more acidic. Glaciers will continue to melt for decades or centuries even centuries. The changes experienced already by many of our planetary support systems will be irreversible for centuries or millennia.
Here are some of the other catastrophic events that the IPCC report believes are likely:
Key Predicted Future Impacts
Temperatures will reach 1.5C above 1850-1900 levels by 2040 under all emissions scenarios considered. If emissions aren't slashed in the next few years, this will happen even earlier. This was predicted in the IPCC's special report on 1.5C in 2018 and this new study now confirms it.
The Arctic is likely to be practically ice-free in September at least once before 2050 in all scenarios assessed
There will be an increasing occurrence of some extreme events "unprecedented in the historical record" even at warming of 1.5C
Extreme sea level events that occurred once a century in the recent past are projected to occur at least annually at more than half of tidal gauge locations by 2100.
There will be likely increases in fire weather in many regions.
This is the first of three reports that will comprise the IPCC’s sixth major climate assessment since 1990: a second report, on climate impacts and adaptation, and a third, on mitigation efforts, will follow next year.
The two most striking new features of the 2021 IPCC report to me—compared to previous iterations— is that despite all of the grim foreboding, it retains a resilient optimistic tone that somehow we humans can actually pull this off. To do that, we will need to cut global emissions in half by 2030 and reach net zero by the middle of this century, and along the way find new methodologies and methods to lower the earth’s temperature. But, by Golly, we can do it, it insists.
The other remarkable feature of this report is its willingness to point fingers at the worst offenders and attribute extreme events to their probable causes and give serious, even if controversial, advice on how to deal with those causes. Stressing that this is ‘Code Red for Humanity’ and citing ‘Irrefutable’ Evidence of Human Influence. UN Secretary-General Guterres said:
We need immediate action on energy. Without deep carbon pollution cuts now, the 1.5°C goal will fall quickly out of reach. This report must sound a death knell for coal and fossil fuels, before they destroy our planet. There must be no new coal plants built after 2021. OECD [Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development] countries must phase out existing coal by 2030, with all others following suit by 2040. Countries should also end all new fossil fuel exploration and production, and shift fossil-fuel subsidies into renewable energy. By 2030, solar and wind capacity should quadruple and renewable energy investments should triple to maintain a net-zero trajectory by mid-century.
Will we actually do those things in time? In a world poisoned by corrupt politicians where there are people more afraid of getting a small needle prick than of dying of a deadly disease, it’s hard to put a lot of faith in the wisdom of our fellow man.
One thing is certain, the consequences of climate change are here. Things will get a lot worse for your kids and grandkids if we don’t fix them today. What do you all think of the IPCC’s findings? What scares you most?
Dig Deeper
Half a dozen takeaways from a first read of the new IPCC AR6 report (realclimate.org)
Climate change: IPCC report is 'code red for humanity' (BBC)
The Guardian view on the IPCC climate report: the fierce urgency of now (Editorial)
Observation-based early-warning signals for a collapse of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (Niklas Boers)
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Time to implement the Halves vs. the Halve Nots Jerry! Those who cut their emissions or carbon footprints in half vs. the BAUs.