Almost 200 countries kicked off online negotiations Monday to validate a U.N. science report that will anchor autumn summits charged with preventing climate catastrophe on a global scale.
Record-smashing heatwaves, floods and drought across three continents in recent weeks, all amplified by global warming, make the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) assessment more than timely.
“It’s going to be a wake-up call, there’s no doubt about that,” said Richard Black, founder and senior associate of the London-based Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit.
The report, he noted, comes only weeks ahead of a U.N. General Assembly, a G-20 summit, and the 197-nation COP26 climate summit in Glasgow.
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The world is a different place since the IPCC’s last comprehensive assessment in 2014 of global heating, past and future.
Lingering doubts that warming was gathering pace or almost entirely human in origin, along with the falsely reassuring notion that climate impacts are tomorrow’s problem, have since evaporated in the haze of deadly heatwaves and fires.
Another milestone since the last IPCC tome: the Paris Agreement has been adopted, with a collective promise to cap the planet’s rising surface temperature at “well below” two degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) above late-19th century levels.
Carbon pollution from burning fossil fuels, methane leaks and agriculture have driven up the thermometer 1.1 degrees Celsius so far, and emissions are rising sharply again after a brief, COVID-imposed interlude, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA).
The 2015 treaty also features an aspirational limit on the warming of 1.5 degrees Celsius, with many parties no doubt assuming this goal could be safely ignored.
But an IPCC special report in 2018 showed how much more devastating an extra 2 degrees Celsius would be, for humanity and the planet.
Source: Daily Sabah
