United Nations panel urges fast action to avoid climate catastrophe

The report says the world will need an annual average investment of 2.4 trillion dollars between 2016 and 2035 (which is 2.5% of present world GDP) in energy system alone to limit the global warming to 1.5 degree celsius. But at 2 degrees, that number jumps to more than 99 percent.

– Half as many animals with back bones and plants would lose the majority of their habitats. In the aggregate they are larger if global warming exceeds 1.5 degrees C. Some impacts may be long-lasting or irreversible, such as the loss of some ecosystems.

Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer, who is on a trip to India touting new infrastructure to ship more oil and gas overseas, said he will leave the findings of the IPCC report to the scientists.

Professor Corinne Le Quere, from the University of East Anglia, said: “For the United Kingdom, this means a rapid switch to renewable energy and electric cars, insulating our homes, planting trees, where possible walking or cycling and eating well – more plants and less meat – and developing an industry to capture carbon and store it underground”. It’s called the 2-degree goal.

The IPCC study, which took almost three years to complete and involved 91 authors from 40 countries, is the first to look in detail at the 1.5 deg C limit, which is one of the goals in the 2015 UN Paris Climate Agreement.

“Twenty-40% of the global human population live in regions that, by the decade 2006-2015, had already experienced warming of more than 1.5°C above pre-industrial in at least one season”.

At the Paris Climate Agreement in 2015, worldwide leaders agreed to keep global warming “well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels” with the hopes to limit this to just 1.5°C. This is analyzed in a recent study showing that the window to prevent runaway climate change and a “hot house” super-heated planet is closing much faster than previously understood.

Sea levels, for example, would be 10cm lower in a 1.5 degree scenario than a 2 degree scenario, and there would be substantially fewer heatwaves and droughts.

Global temperature is now rising 0.2C with each decade, and it is estimated we will reach 1.5C by 2040. He likened the report to an academic exercise wondering what would happen if a frog had wings.

Yet report authors said they remain optimistic. “We must reduce emissions as quickly as possible to keep 1.5 deg C of warming within reach”, said Mr Andrew Steer, president and chief executive of the Washington-based World Resources Institute. “It’s now their responsibility.to decide whether they can act on it”. “We have a lot of the solutions available to us today”, she says. “This is our chance to decide what the world is going to look like”.

“Emissions would need to decline rapidly across all of society’s main sectors, including buildings, industry, transport, energy, and agriculture, forestry and other land use”, the report said.

The 1.5-degree scenario will require cutting Carbon dioxide emissions by as much as 45 percent over the 20-year period from 2010 to 2030 and to a net zero by 2050-net zero meaning that all Carbon dioxide released will need to be captured and stored or reused.

Developing nations and least developed countries have been asking developed nations, particularly the United States, to take historical and moral responsibility for being one of the largest greenhouse gas emitters.

Soot from power station chimneys and vehicle tailpipes can be captured at source or reduced by switching to burning cleaner fuels. And that would have the side benefit of avoiding more than 100 million premature deaths through this century, the report said. On the plus side, these technologies are becoming increasingly viable, it adds.

Coral and other ecosystems are also at risk. Collapse of coral reefs would be essentially ensured.

Well, it’s time to buckle up folks because unless we take drastic action, and soon, catastrophe may be inevitable.