Tag: IPCC Sixth Assessment Report

Beyond the brink

time bomb by Dirk Knight via Flickr CC

When it comes to the climate crisis we’re not on the brink of disaster, we’re beyond the brink.

A “Synthesis Report” report released Monday from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), also known as the Sixth Assessment Report (AR6) says the world is likely to miss its climate target — limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above preindustrial temperatures — within a decade.

Climate change has already caused “substantial damages, and increasingly irreversible losses, in terrestrial, 36 freshwater, cryospheric, and coastal and open ocean ecosystems.”  Losses of species have been driven by increases in the magnitude of heat extremes with “mass mortality” events recorded on land and in the ocean, the report continues. Impacts on some ecosystems are “approaching Irreversibility,” such as the impacts of hydrological changes resulting from the retreat of glaciers, or the changes n some mountain and Arctic ecosystems driven by permafrost thaw.

Climate change has reduced food security and affected water security, “hindering efforts to meet Sustainable Development Goals.”

All the widely documented impacts from human-caused climate change “continue to intensify,” the report says.

Humanity has reached a “critical moment in history,” IPCC Chair Hoesung Lee asserted: The world has all the knowledge, tools and financial resources needed to achieve its climate goals, but after decades of disregarding scientific warnings and delaying climate efforts, the window for action is rapidly closing.

At the current global pace of carbon emissions, the world will burn through its remaining “carbon budget” by 2030. Doing so would put the long-term goal of keeping global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) irrevocably out of reach. Keeping warming below th1.5 degrees Celsius threshold would help save the world’s coral reefs and preserve the Arctic’s protective sea ice layer. It could also stave off dramatic sea level rise by avoiding further destabilization in Antarctica and Greenland.

So we are all sitting on a powder keg, a loudly ticking time bomb, and while we may have the ability to defuse this bomb, can we do it?

A Desperate Read from IPCC

Sometimes we have to take it slowly, but this is not the time. The IPCC report is not a gentle meditation.

Climate change by quote catalog

The Sixth Assessment Report of the .Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, released earlier this month underscores and update what the IPCC has stated for many year.

The 42-page “Summary for Policymakers” — the full report is more than 3400 densely-written  pages — is more of the same, only more so.

Here are some of the summary’s findings:

  • On the “current state” of the climate: “It is unequivocal that human influence has warmed the atmosphere, ocean and land. Widespread and rapid changes in the atmosphere, ocean, cryosphere and biosphere have occurred.” Each of the last four decades” has been successively warmer than any decade that preceded it since 1850. Global surface temperature in the first two decades of the 21st century (2001-2020) was 0.99 [0.84- 1.10] °C higher than 1850-1900.”
  • “The scale of recent changes across the climate system as a whole and the present state of many aspects of the climate system are unprecedented over many centuries to many thousands of years.”
  •  “Human-induced climate change is already affecting many weather and climate extremes in every region across the globe. Evidence of observed changes in extremes such as heatwaves, heavy precipitation, droughts, and tropical cyclones, and, in particular, their attribution to human influence, has strengthened since AR5 (the fifth Assessment Report).”
  • “Improved knowledge of climate processes, paleoclimate evidence and the response of the climate system to increasing radiative forcing gives a best estimate of equilibrium climate sensitivity of 3°C with a narrower range compared to AR5.”

On “possible climate futures”:

  • “Global surface temperature will continue to increase until at least the mid-century under all emissions scenarios considered. Global warming of 1.5°C and 2°C will be exceeded during the 21st century unless deep reductions in CO2 and other greenhouse gas emissions occur in the coming decades.”
  • “Many changes in the climate system become larger in direct relation to increasing global warming. They include increases in the frequency and intensity of hot extremes, marine heatwaves, and heavy precipitation, agricultural and ecological droughts in some regions, and proportion of intense tropical cyclones, as well as reductions in Arctic sea ice, snow cover and permafrost.”
  • “Continued global warming is projected to further intensify the global water cycle,including its variability, global monsoon precipitation and the severity of wet and dry events.”
  • “Many changes due to past and future greenhouse gas emissions are irreversible for centuries to millennia, especially changes in the ocean, ice sheets and global sea level.”
  • “With further global warming, every region is projected to increasingly experience concurrent and multiple changes in climatic impact-drivers. Changes in several climatic impact-drivers would be more widespread at 2°C compared to 1.5°C global warming and even more widespread and/or pronounced for higher warming levels.”

Even in scenarios with lower GHG emissions, it will take 20 years or more to detect “discernible differences”  in global surface temperature trends. In short, this crisis is virtually “irreversible.” Tough stuff indeed. And it seems hopeless.

We want to see with wisdom and clarity what is going on with our planet and accept the facts in front of us. The time to act is now

Further reading:

Porsche Demands 1,300 Suppliers Use Renewable Energy