Climate Scientists and Environmental Groups Alarmed Over New UN Climate Report
Experts say the report confirms that nations’ efforts to cut emissions have been grossly insufficient to date.
The world’s nations must commit to dramatically slashing greenhouse gas emissions in the near future or risk a “catastrophic” rise in global average temperatures, a key United Nations climate report published Thursday warned.
Earth’s warming could trigger sweeping changes in the natural world that would be hard, if not impossible, to reverse.
Right now, every moment of every day, we humans are reconfiguring Earth’s climate bit by bit. Hotter summers and wetter storms. Higher seas and fiercer wildfires. The steady, upward turn of the dial on a host of threats to our homes, our societies and the environment around us.
We might also be changing the climate in an even bigger way.
The PR pros will tell you not to bother talking about arcane topics like 1.5 degrees — no normies understand the significance, and it just sounds like a little-bitty thing, anyway. They’re probably right. And maybe that explains why we just lived through the first full year above 1.5 C with only perfunctory coverage by the global media.
New data shows the planet’s fever stayed above a crucial target for a full year, but it would need to do that for decades to breach the Paris Agreement limit.
Last month wasn’t only the hottest June by far in the observed temperature record, but marked the first-ever 12-month stretch of the Earth’s average temperature exceeding 1.5 degrees Celsius of temperature rise above the pre-industrial baseline against which human-caused warming is measured.
