Nearly 200 nations yesterday began an online UN meeting to finalize what is sure to be a harrowing catalogue of climate change impacts — past, present and future.
Species extinction, ecosystem collapse, mosquito-borne disease, deadly heat, water shortages and reduced crop yields are already measurably worse due to global warming.
Just in the past year, the world has seen a cascade of unprecedented floods, heat waves and wildfires across four continents.
Photo: AP
All these impacts will accelerate in the coming decades even if the carbon pollution driving climate change is rapidly brought to heel, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report is likely to say.
A crucial, 40-page “Summary for Policymakers” — distilling underlying chapters totaling thousands of pages, and reviewed line-by-line — is due to be published on Feb. 28.
“This is a real moment of reckoning,” said Rachel Cleetus, climate and energy policy director at the Union of Concerned Scientists. “This not just more scientific projections about the future. This is about extreme events and slow-onset disasters that people are experiencing right now.”
The report will also underscore the urgent need for “adaptation” — preparing for devastating consequences that can no longer be avoided, according to an early draft seen by Agence France-Presse last year.
In some cases this means that adapting to intolerably hot days, flash flooding and storm surges has become a matter of life and death.
“Even if we find solutions for reducing carbon emissions, we will still need solutions to help us adapt,” said Alexandre Magnan, a researcher at the Institute for Sustainable Development and International Relations in Paris and a coauthor of the report.
IPCC assessments — it will be the sixth since 1990 — are divided into three sections, each with its own volunteer “working group” of hundreds of scientists.
In August last year the first installment on physical science found that global warming is virtually certain to pass 1.5°C, probably within a decade.
Earth’s surface has warmed 1.1°C since the 19th century.
The 2015 Paris agreement calls for capping global warming at “well below” 2°C, and ideally 1.5°C.
This report is sure to reinforce this more ambitious goal. It will likewise underscore that vulnerability to extreme weather events — even when they are made worse by global warming — can be reduced by better planning and preparation, according to the draft.
This is not only true in the developing world, said Imperial College professor Friederike Otto, who pointed to massive flooding in Germany last year that killed scores and caused billions in damage.
“Even without global warming there would have been a huge rainfall event in a densely populated geography where the rivers flood very easily,” said Otto, a pioneer in the science of quantifying the extent to which climate change makes extreme weather events more likely or intense.
The report will zero in on how climate change is widening already yawning gaps in inequality, both between regions and within nations, and that the people least responsible for climate change are the ones suffering the most from its impacts.
Not only is this unjust, experts and advocates say, it is a barrier to tackling the problem.
“I do not think there are pathways to sustainable development that do not substantively address equity issues,” said Clark University professor Edward Carr, a lead author of one of the report’s chapters.
The report is also likely to highlight dangerous “tipping points,” invisible temperature trip wires in the climate system for irreversible and potentially catastrophic change.
Some of them — such as the melting of permafrost housing twice as much carbon as in the atmosphere — could fuel global warming all on their own.
“There is a finite set of choices we can make that would move us productively into the future,” Carr said. “Every day we wait and delay, some of those choices get harder or go away.”
The third and final installment of the IPCC assessment, due out in early April, examines options for curbing carbon emissions and removing carbon from the atmosphere.
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