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Sunday evening the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released an urgent report on the state of global warming. In other words: the laws of the physical universe state that we can maintain global warming at 1.5 ° C above pre-industrial levels, an optimistic goal defined in the Paris Agreement, but we are running out of time quickly. At the moment, we will reach perhaps 1.5 times in a dozen years at a rate that we generate emissions. And the consequences will be disastrous.
To correct the course and avoid 1.5 ° C or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, we will have to cut emissions by half by 2030 and adopt a carbon-neutral climate by 2050, the report says. This gives us three decades to transform our energy production into something unrecognizable, combining renewable energies with carbon capture techniques such as forest enhancement and perhaps even aspirating waste from the atmosphere. and imprison them underground. We will also have to change our behavior as individuals. Which means, we are looking at an unprecedented change, which is essentially the restructuring of civilization.
"The report sent a very clear message: if we do not act now and if we have substantial reductions in carbon dioxide emissions over the next decade, we are making it very difficult to keep warming below 1.5 ° C, "said IPCC Jim Skea at a press conference announcing the report, a large-scale survey conducted by nearly 100 authors (and 1,000 critics) citing 6,000 studies.
The 2015 Paris Agreement provided for the target of 1.5 goals pushed by island nations, whose rising water threatens to drown. The least ambitious goal – though still very ambitious – is 2 degrees.
Which, according to this new report, would be much more ruinous. At 2 degrees, 10 million more people will be exposed to the rising sea than 1.5 degrees. This additional half-degree also means that much larger populations will be exposed to water shortages. You are looking at increasing biodiversity loss, worsening storms, increasing numbers of people plunged into poverty, and steadily declining yields of key crops like rice, corn, and wheat.
Basically, a difference of only half a degree may seem minimal when you choose what you will wear for the day, but it will worsen climate change, a point that this report insists on detail. "This shows that half a degree of global warming matters and that limiting it to 1.5 ° C instead of 2 ° C would avoid several impacts, including an increase in heat waves and extreme temperatures in most countries. inhabited regions, abundant rainfall in several regions and droughts in some regions, "says Sonia Seneviratne, climate change researcher at ETH Zurich. In addition, limiting warming would prevent some irreversible changes related to sea level rise and coral reef destruction.
"More importantly," adds Seneviratne, "it shows that it is still physically possible to limit global warming to 1.5 ° C, even if it requires rapid, profound and unprecedented changes in all aspects of the society".
Still, the outlook is bleak. The technological and social changes that the world needs need all that has happened in history. "This report is not happy," said Thanu Yakupitiyage, spokesperson for the 350.org climate advocacy group. "They report on the real needs of the moment. We are in the midst of a climate crisis.
"At the end of the day, we are talking about millions of lives at stake," says Yakupitiyage. "We are already seeing how much people are affected by heat waves, sea level rise, forest fires, hurricanes".
The Paris Agreement is a remarkable act of international cooperation to deal with climate change and its consequences, but commitments made by different countries are not enough to limit warming to 1.5 degrees, says the report. It is also clear that it is not enough to promise that we will put more electric cars on our roads, that we will put our coal plants out of service, or that we will invest in more solar power plants. Achieving this goal will require a major rethinking of global energy consumption in a decade.
Here is the good news: if the world in general is struggling to meet the ambition of the Paris Agreement, cities have led the way in reducing emissions, competing to deploy technologies such as large-scale electric cars, but also share knowledge of what works and what does not work in the fight against climate change. Consider that in 2016 alone, Los Angeles reduced its emissions by 11%, equivalent to 700,000 fewer cars on the roads. Meanwhile, its economy has actually increased.
The IPCC report could come at a particularly opportune time. In December, leaders will meet in Poland for COP24, known more officially as the 24th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. And let's just say they will not do it do not talk about this new report.
Janos Pasztor, executive director of the Carnegie Climate Geoengineering Governance Initiative and former United Nations Under-Secretary-General for Climate Change, predicts that the meeting "will be an important next step in seeing what governments are actually saying in the climate change negotiations. this report. "
The severity of the report could also speak to more sophisticated strategies for combating climate change than reducing emissions. Scientists also play with the concept of geoengineering. This could involve carbon capture techniques or solar geoengineering to bounce solar radiation back into space by spraying aerosols into the atmosphere or lightening clouds.
"Some corners will be pushing for more and more options like solar geoengineering," says Pasztor. "It's a fact of life. This does not necessarily mean that we will have to use solar geoengineering, but if you want to prudently manage global climate risk, it's fair to say that you have to look at all the options. "
Geoengineering, however, presents a host of potential problems. You could spray foam on the surface of the ocean to reflect light in space, but it could also change the weather. And the problem with such solar radiation management, or MRS, is that even in the best case, it does not solve the underlying problem. "Once emitted, CO2 stays in the atmosphere for millennia," explains Seneviratne. "Any approach related to SRM mitigates only some of the symptoms of climate change, but not its root cause, namely high concentrations of CO2." This means that problems such as ocean acidification, which inflicts a lot of damage to marine life, would remain without address.
Once again, we will not do geoengineering to get us out of this mess – reducing emissions is our number one priority. But as this new report makes clear, the disease we have unleashed on this planet is getting worse, and we are not doing enough to find the cure.
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