Climate-driven weather extremes will worsen without deep emissions cuts: UN

Human-caused global warming from the emission of fossil fuels is already affecting extreme weather in every region across the world, which will become more frequent and intense with every additional increment of warming, the United Nations said in a new report Monday.

Many changes due to past and future greenhouse gas emissions are irreversible for centuries, especially deep ocean warming, ice sheet melt, and sea-level rise.

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But the world is inching closer to reaching a temperature threshold that would lead to even worse consequences unless governments take action in the coming decades to cut emissions deeply.

Since the last report in 2013 by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, compiled by the world's leading climate scientists, both greenhouse gas emissions and the average global temperature have continued to climb.

The Earth has already warmed 1.2 degrees Celsius since the Industrial Revolution. Each of the last four decades has been successively warmer.

The latest U.N. report says the world will hit 1.5 degrees of warming in about 12 years if emissions don’t fall. If that happens, it would represent a failure of the Paris Climate Agreement, under which countries pledged to hold total global warming to “well below” 2 degrees and agreed to “pursue efforts” to limit warming to 1.5 degrees.

In 2019, the concentration of carbon in the atmosphere was higher than at any time in at least 2 million years, the report said.

“The ship has kind of sailed on 1.5 degrees,” Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist at the Breakthrough Institute who contributed to the report, told the Washington Examiner.

U.N. scientists previously projected in 2018 that the world must nearly halve global emissions by 2030 and cut them to net-zero by 2050 in order to prevent global warming above 1.5 degrees.

That finding prompted a host of Democratic presidential candidates in the 2020 election, including President Joe Biden, to declare that the world had a 12-year deadline to avoid climate catastrophe.

“The idea that the world will reduce all emissions to zero that fast seems a little implausible from where we are today,” Hausfather said.

But Hausfather said he is more optimistic that the less-stringent 2 degrees target can be met, which the U.N. report shows would require getting emissions to zero in the 2070s.

While a half-degree may not sound like much, the report details that even that much warming could have a big impact on the natural world, leading to a loss of all coral reefs and risking the extinction of species that cannot adapt to warmer temperatures.

Every additional half-degree of warming causes “clearly discernible” increases in the intensity and frequency of heat waves, heavy precipitation, and droughts, the report said.

The report is noteworthy for using stronger language to declare that human activity is causing climate change and attributing extreme weather events to global warming.

While the 2013 report said it was "extremely likely" that human industry was causing climate change, this year’s report makes plain that “the best estimate is that all the warming the world has experienced is due to human activity,” Hausfather said.

The release of the report comes during a summer of extreme weather that has throttled the West Coast, including massive wildfires, record-high temperatures, and a megadrought.

“There is a bit of a perceptual threshold that has been passed for people the past decade,” Hausfather said. “Things have changed enough to see things aren't what they used to be. There are real changes becoming harder to ignore affecting people's lives.”

The U.N. report evaluated five possible emissions trajectories the world could follow, finding that global temperatures will continue to increase until at least the mid-century under all of them.

“We worry that those who are already reluctant to support policies to reduce or adapt to future warming will respond to the report by claiming climate change cannot be solved and that climate policies are futile,” said Alex Flint, the executive director of Alliance for Market Solutions, a group that supports imposing a carbon tax to address climate change.

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But climate-related changes would be more widespread with 2 degrees of warming compared to 1.5 degrees and even more pronounced for higher warming levels.

“It is going to get warmer, and the seas will rise. But we should not resign ourselves to our worst future,” Flint said.

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Tags: News, Energy and Environment, United Nations, Climate Change, Paris Agreement, Fossil Fuels, Weather, Science

Original Author: Josh Siegel

Original Location: Climate-driven weather extremes will worsen without deep emissions cuts: UN