Joe.My.God. LGBT News
The New York Times reports:
A landmark report from the United Nations’ scientific panel on climate change paints a far more dire picture of the immediate consequences of climate change than previously thought and says that avoiding the damage requires transforming the world economy at a speed and scale that has “no documented historic precedent.”
The report, issued on Monday by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a group of scientists convened by the United Nations to guide world leaders, describes a world of worsening food shortages and wildfires, and a mass die-off of coral reefs as soon as 2040 — a period well within the lifetime of much of the global population.
The BBC reports:
“Scientists might want to write in capital letters, ‘ACT NOW, IDIOTS,’ but they need to say that with facts and numbers,” said Kaisa Kosonen, of Greenpeace, who was an observer at the negotiations. “And they have.”
The researchers have used these facts and numbers to paint a picture of the world with a dangerous fever, caused by humans. We used to think if we could keep warming below two degrees this century, then the changes we would experience would be manageable.
Not any more. This new study says that going past 1.5C is dicing with the planet’s liveability. And the 1.5C temperature “guard rail” could be exceeded in just 12 years, in 2030.
The Weather Channel reports:
Greenhouse gas emissions from human activity, which come mainly from burning fossil fuels, would need to be cut roughly in half by 2030 and virtually eliminated by 2050 in order to keep from “overshooting” the 1.5°C target, said the report.
Otherwise, carbon dioxide will need to be drawn out of the atmosphere on an increasingly massive scale. Not hitting this goal would result in up to six feet of sea level rise, critical crop loss and the near eradication of the world’s coral reefs, among the serious impacts, the report finds.
“Avoiding overshoot and reliance on future large-scale deployment of carbon dioxide removal (CDR) can only be achieved if global CO2 emissions start to decline well before 2030,” said the study, which was released on Monday after study members made final revisions at an IPCC meeting in Incheon, South Korea.