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posted by chromas on Monday October 08 2018, @10:40AM   Printer-friendly

Major Climate Report Describes a Strong Risk of Crisis as Early as 2040

A landmark report from the United Nations' scientific panel on climate change paints a far more dire picture of the immediate consequences of climate change than previously thought and says that avoiding the damage requires transforming the world economy at a speed and scale that has "no documented historic precedent."

The report, issued on Monday by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a group of scientists convened by the United Nations to guide world leaders, describes a world of worsening food shortages and wildfires, and a mass die-off of coral reefs as soon as 2040 — a period well within the lifetime of much of the global population.

The report "is quite a shock, and quite concerning," said Bill Hare, an author of previous I.P.C.C. reports and a physicist with Climate Analytics, a nonprofit organization. "We were not aware of this just a few years ago." The report was the first to be commissioned by world leaders under the Paris agreement, the 2015 pact by nations to fight global warming.

The authors found that if greenhouse gas emissions continue at the current rate, the atmosphere will warm up by as much as 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit (1.5 degrees Celsius) above preindustrial levels by 2040, inundating coastlines and intensifying droughts and poverty. Previous work had focused on estimating the damage if average temperatures were to rise by a larger number, 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit (2 degrees Celsius), because that was the threshold scientists previously considered for the most severe effects of climate change. The new report, however, shows that many of those effects will come much sooner, at the 2.7-degree mark.

Scientists Call for $2.4 Trillion (per year) Shift From Coal to Renewables

The world must invest $2.4 trillion in clean energy every year through 2035 and cut the use of coal-fired power to almost nothing by 2050 to slow the quickest pace of climate change since the end of the last ice age, according to scientists convened by the United Nations.

[...] To limit warming to 1.5 degrees [Celsius] would require a roughly fivefold increase in average annual investment in low-carbon energy technologies by 2050, compared with 2015. The $2.4 trillion needed annually through 2035 is also an almost sevenfold increase from the $333.5 billion Bloomberg NEF estimated was invested in renewable energy last year.

Also at Reuters and CBS.

See also: IPCC climate change report calls for urgent action to phase out fossil fuels - live


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 08 2018, @09:54PM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 08 2018, @09:54PM (#746158)

    I'm curious: why wouldn't "sterilize all humans" stop global warming?

  • (Score: 2) by Unixnut on Monday October 08 2018, @10:20PM

    by Unixnut (5779) on Monday October 08 2018, @10:20PM (#746172)

    Because the climate is constantly changing, humans may influence the speed at which it happens, or the direction it temporarily tends towards, but the earth is a dynamic and chaotic system, and it never stays fixed in place.

    Humans have an obsession with "fixing" things so they don't change. Hence so much is put on "tradition", and the longer something is around, the more it is protected (e.g. religion). Some kind of order and continuity is needed for the human mind to be happy.

    when it comes to social order, and even the local environment, humans can keep it more or less static. However when faced with huge, powerful chaotic systems, that we can't seem to control no matter how much we try, some people get all flustered about it, and keep trying fruitlessly to prevent change rather than embrace it.

    If humans were all sterilised at once, within one generation we would be extinct, and the earths climate will continue to change, other life will adapt to the new conditions, perhaps some new intelligent species will evolve, form societies, and eventually become so dominant and secure that they can spend their time arguing about how to stop climate change, and then the cycle will repeat.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 08 2018, @10:46PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 08 2018, @10:46PM (#746183)

    You raise a good point. OP forgot Mexicans.