The levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, the main driver of ‘global warming’ and the consequent ‘climate change’ have hit a new record high – Earth continuing its higher temperature since record keeping began in 1880. The World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) said the ‘long-term warming trend’ continues as the 20 warmest years on record have been in the past 22 years, with the top four in the past four years. The rising temperature is heading towards levels that many experts believe is posing a profound threat to both, the natural world and to human civilisation.
“Extracting and processing materials, fuel and food contributes as much as half of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions”, the United Nations (UN) said recently when experts were exploring ways to rein in exploding global consumption. Using dozens of data sources, the authors of a major new report presented lawmakers and businesses with a stark choice; drastically reform the global economy to get more from less, or risk the collapse of global infrastructure. With countries already committed under the Paris climate deal to curb emissions to fend off the worst impacts of global warming, experts say there is little hope of meeting that goal without an ‘urgent and systematic transformation’ in how we use Earth’s resources.
The heat extremes are especially pervasive in the Arctic, with temperature in major part of a year running 20 to 30 degrees Fahrenheit above normal. Sea ice in the region has been in precipitous decline for years, and Arctic communities are already wrestling with enormous problems, such as rapid coastal erosion, caused by the changing climate. The scale of the heat burst has been startling to many of the researchers, and some of them fear an accelerated era of global warming could be at hand over the next few years. Even at current temperatures, billions of tonnes of land ice are melting. The sea is also absorbing most of the heat trapped by human emissions.
Poverty, starvation, flooding, heat waves, droughts, wildfires and diseases already lead to human tragedies. They are likely to worsen as the Earth warms further from man-made climate change. Throughout the 21st century, climate change impacts will slow down economic growth and poverty reduction, further erode food security and trigger new poverty traps, the latter particularly in urban areas and emerging hotspots of hunger, experts warned.
“Climate change is causing more havoc than geophysical events like earthquakes and tsunamis”, says a study expert by the UN Office of Disaster Risk Reduction while revealing how climate change has affected us in the last 20 years when about 91 per cent of all disasters during 1998-2018 were caused by floods, storms, droughts, heat waves, wildfires and other such extreme weather events, something that should alarm policy-makers across the globe by such climate change incidents with huge losses caused to human lives and properties. Globally, disaster losses are estimated at US$ 520 billion per annum, pushing more than 26 million people into poverty every year. The inequality is rising far greater than what is projected, the UN study noted.
According to researchers, a warmer world, with bursts of heavy rains and prolonged droughts, will worsen some of the existing effects and there are only a dozen years left for global warming to be kept to a maximum of 1.5 degrees Celsius over pre-industrial levels. After that, even a half a degree increase will significantly worsen the risk of droughts, floods, extreme heat waves and impoverish hundreds of millions of people. A special report on global warming by the UN’s Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), clearly shows how half a degree Celsius warming makes a big difference, adversely impacting global population and overall ecosystem through intense heat waves, melting of polar ice, sea level rise, erratic rainfall, reduction of farm yield and vanishing of living species.
In fact, the IPCC report reveals in details how limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius rather than 2 degrees Celsius could result in 420 million fewer people being exposed to severe weather conditions. Researchers claim that it is possible to meet the new warming target, provided nations together take ‘rapid and far reaching’ transitions over the next 10 to 20 years in land use, energy, industry, buildings, transport and cities to cut emissions and reach ‘net zero’ around 2050 – 25 years earlier than what they planned under the 2015 Paris accord of 2-degree Celsius goal. The report said “urgent and unprecedented changes” were needed to reach the target, which it described as “affordable and feasible”.
Interestingly, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres during his recent tour in certain South Pacific island nations, where rising sea levels are threatening their very existence, bitterly complained that the world was “not on track” to limited global temperature rises to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial revolution level. In a strong message for action on climate change, Guterres said international political resolve was fading and it was the small island countries that were “really in the frontline” and would suffer most. The latest stepped-up UN’s diplomacy will culminate with the Climate Action Summit in September at New York, an event billed as a last chance to prevent irreversible climate change, three years after the Paris agreement went into force.
So, let’s be hopeful that the UN’s Climate Action Summit will mark a turning point for the entire world.
(The writer is a freelance journalist)
