“Quantum Leap Needed” To Avoid Global Warming – Grid To Blame
UN secretary-general António Guterres says “a quantum leap in climate action is needed to meet the 1.5C limit set by scientists.
“The climate time-bomb is ticking,” and a new report was a “survival guide for humanity.”
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 on Monday.
Production and consumption of energy is known to cause 75% of the problem, but Utility companies and policiticians are still failing to take the neccessary action – drastically reduce energy use NOW.
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.
“Our world needs climate action on all fronts: everything, everywhere, all at once,” said Gutteres, urging richer countries to significantly improve their net zero greenhouse gas emissions targets, and strive to achieve the goal by as close to 2040 as possible, rather than by 2050.
Global warming is “more likely than not” in the near-term to reach a 1.5C rise since pre-industrial times, the world’s top scientists said, and climate change already taking place will continue across the lifespan of three generations born in 1950, 1970 and 2020.
The summary report found the risks of warming were greater than was thought at the time of the last assessment in 2014. Some regions had already reached the “limits” of what they could adapt to.
But the report, signed off by governments worldwide, also concluded that humanity had the tools to curb and adapt to climate change, and a lack of political “commitment” was a key barrier to progress in what was a “rapidly closing window”.
The definitive report draws together six landmark scientific assessments published since 2018. It comes ahead of the UN COP28 climate summit to be held in the United Arab Emirates that will feature the so-called global stock take.
Carbon emissions continued to rise relentlessly last year but they must fall by almost half by 2030 for the world to have any hope of limiting global warming to 1.5C, previous IPCC reports have said.
The latest report included the year 2035 in its assessment in an effort to bridge previous warming timelines pegged to 2030 and 2050.
The sequence of devastating extreme weather events in the past year is expected to continue, including floods, fires and droughts that the scientists said would become more frequent and intense with every fraction of a degree of warming.
Researchers and policymakers signed off the report after a week of discussions, including a frantic 24 hours of final nonstop negotiations as government representatives from fossil fuel-producing nations clashed on issues including finance, carbon capture technology and fossil fuel subsidies.
Detlef van Vuuren, a report author from the Netherlands, …
