Paris, 21 March 2023 (GNP): The UN said on Monday that devastating climate effects are occurring quicker than anticipated as the world stumbles to exceeding the 1.5 degree Celsius warming limit in little over a decade.
Temperatures witnessed in recent years have fueled catastrophic droughts, crop-wilting heatwaves, and deadly storms and flooding.
https://twitter.com/UNFCCC/status/1631618168262213636?cxt=HHwWiIC-hYqF1qQtAAAA
The UN’s climate advisory group said in a pivotal study that even if emissions of planet-warming fossil fuels rapidly decline, future generations would remember the warmest years of the 2020s as being comparatively moderate.
The report’s primary author, Friederike Otto, a climate scientist at Imperial College London, told AFP that the warmest years thus far will be among the coldest in the next generations.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 36-pages “summary for policymakers,” which is a compilation of six of its most significant reports published since 2018, serves as an alarming reminder that despite having the technology to avert a global climate catastrophe, humanity is still not using it.
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While the world is now projected to warm to 1.5C over pre-industrial levels in the early 2030s, it will exacerbate the severity of the effects in the coming years.
But, the IPCC chief Hoesung Lee added that there is still a possibility of turning the situation around, calling the report a “message of hope.”
“We have the know-how, technology, tools, financial resources, and everything needed to overcome the climate problems we have known about for so long,” he said in a video interview.
“What’s lacking at this point is a strong political will to resolve this issue once and for all”, he added.
Today’s #IPCC report leaves no doubt: We have to do more on #ClimateChange.
If we are to halve emissions by 2030 and build climate-resilient societies, we need to get specific now. #COP28 is the moment to agree on the milestones that will take us to our 2030 targets.
— Simon Stiell (@simonstiell) March 20, 2023
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres responded to the report by stating that wealthier countries should hasten their goal of being carbon neutral by 2050 or later in order to “defuse the climatic time bomb.”
The head of the UN remarked in a video message that “Humanity is on thin ice, and that ice is melting quickly” as the IPCC experts group released its most recent report, which he compared to “a survival guide for mankind.”
The IPCC made it abundantly obvious that keeping global warming below two degrees Celsius would be economically advantageous for society and the global economy.