An extremely important article for us all. As our eyes and hearts courageously open to the truth of what is happening all across our Earth Mother, may the growing consciousness of what we collectively face bring us together as never before. May we unite in every way humanly possible in the greatest challenge ever: to preserve a habitable planet for humans and all of Earth's inhabitants. We are truly all in this together. ― Molly
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| A sign at Death Valley National Park in California warns visitors of
extreme heat in July 2021. (Melina Mara/The Washington Post) |
“I have seen many scientific reports in my time, but nothing like this,”
U.N. Secretary General António Guterres said in a statement. Noting the
litany of devastating impacts that already are unfolding, he described
the document as “an atlas of human suffering and a damning indictment of
failed climate leadership." "This abdication of leadership is criminal," Guterres added. "The
world’s biggest polluters are guilty of arson of our only home.”
In the hotter and more hellish world humans are creating, parts of the
planet could become unbearable in the not-so-distant future, a panel of
the world’s foremost scientists warned Monday in an exhaustive report on the escalating toll of climate change.
10 steps you can take to lower your carbon footprint
Unchecked greenhouse gas emissions will raise sea levels several feet,
swallowing small island nations and overwhelming even the world’s
wealthiest coastal regions. Drought, heat, hunger and disaster may force
millions of people from their homes. Coral reefs could vanish, along
with a growing number of animal species. Disease-carrying insects would
proliferate. Deaths — from malnutrition, extreme heat, pollution — will
surge.
These are some of the grim projections detailed by the Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change, a United Nations body dedicated to providing
policymakers with regular assessments of the warming world.
Drawing on thousands of academic studies from around the globe, the
sweeping analysis finds that climate change is already causing
“dangerous and widespread disruption” to the natural world, as well as
billions of people around the planet. Failure to curb pollution from
fossil fuels and other human activities, it says, will condemn the world
to a future that is both universally dangerous and deeply unequal.
Low-income countries, which generate only a tiny fraction of global
emissions, will experience the vast majority of deaths and displacement
from the worst-case warming scenarios, the IPCC warns. Yet these nations
have the least capacity to adapt — a disparity that extends to even the
basic research needed to understand looming risks.
[Postcards from Earth’s climate futures]
“I have seen many scientific reports in my time, but nothing like this,”
U.N. Secretary General António Guterres said in a statement. Noting the
litany of devastating impacts that already are unfolding, he described
the document as “an atlas of human suffering and a damning indictment of
failed climate leadership.”
“This abdication of leadership is criminal,” Guterres added. “The
world’s biggest polluters are guilty of arson of our only home.”
Yet if there is a glimmer of hope in the more than 3,500-page report, it
is that the world still has a chance to choose a less catastrophic
path. While some climate impacts are destined to worsen, the amount that
Earth ultimately warms is not yet written in stone.
The report makes clear, however, that averting the worst-case scenarios
will require nothing less than transformational change on a global
scale.
The world will need to overhaul energy systems, redesign cities and
revolutionize how humans grow food. Rather than reacting to climate
disturbances after they happen, the IPCC says, communities must more
aggressively adapt for the changes they know are coming. These
investments could save trillions of dollars and millions of lives, but
they have so far been in short supply.
The IPCC report is a warning letter to a world on the brink. The urgency
and escalating toll of climate change has never been clearer, it says.
Any further delay will force humanity to miss the “brief and rapidly
closing window of opportunity to secure a livable and sustainable future
for all.”
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| The Dixie Fire burns in Greenville, Calif., last year. (Stuart W. Palley for The Washington Post) |
Unavoidable upheavals
Monday’s report is the second of three installments in the IPCC’s latest assessment for world leaders.
The first section, on the “physical science” of climate change, was published in August
and provided a “code red for humanity,” Guterres said at the time,
warning that people have already heated the planet at a startling pace.
Humanity has unleashed more than a trillion tons of carbon dioxide
since the start of the Industrial Revolution, driving up global
temperatures by more than a degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit).
Combined with the effects of air and water pollution, habitat loss and
widespread poverty, this unprecedented warming is wreaking havoc on
natural and human systems alike, the new report finds.
Already, climate change has caused the local disappearance of over 400
plant and animal species. Since 1945, warming-induced severe drought has
killed up to 20 percent of trees in North America and parts of Africa.
Activities that drive climate change, primarily the burning of fossil
fuels, doubled the area burned by wildfires in western North America
between 1984 and 2017. In the oceans, warming has triggered “abrupt and
often irreversible” melting of sea ice, bleaching of coral reefs and the
demise of kelp forests, the IPCC report says.
Human communities also are dealing with increasingly deadly threats. One
study of the world’s 150 biggest cities found that these areas have
experienced a 500 percent increase in extreme heat since 1980. An
average of 20 million people per year are forced from their homes by
weather disasters as the warming atmosphere intensifies hurricanes, adds
fuel to wildfires and heightens the risk of cataclysmic floods.
These escalating calamities are beginning to reverse decades of progress
in agriculture, infrastructure and health — cutting into crop yields,
damaging buildings and transit systems and incubating the microbes and
insects that spread disease. Every year, roughly 40 million premature
deaths can be attributed to malaria, cholera, heat stress and other
climate-related illnesses.
“We are losing living spaces for species, and for ourselves as well,
because with climate change, some parts of the planet will become
uninhabitable,” Hans-Otto Pörtner, a German climate researcher and an
IPCC co-chair, recently told reporters.
Within the next decade, global average temperatures could reach 1.5
degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above preindustrial levels — a
threshold scientists say is critical to avoid a series of irreversible
changes. World leaders pledged in the 2015 Paris climate agreement to
limit warming to “well below” 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees
Fahrenheit), with a goal of not exceeding 1.5 C.
Scientific studies have not identified a single point at which climate
impacts go from catastrophic to civilization-ending. Instead, the IPCC
warns, the risk of crossing certain “tipping points” increases as the
world warms beyond 1.5 degrees Celsius.
Yet even if humanity musters the willpower to take drastic action, the
world cannot avoid grappling with upheavals that are already underway.
By 2030, the number of children whose growth is stunted by malnutrition
is projected to grow by at least half a million, the report finds. The
glaciers of Mount Kilimanjaro will be completely gone in 2040. By the
mid-century, between 31 million and 143 million people across Latin
America, sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia could be displaced by weather
extremes.
Some baked-in climate impacts will transpire no matter how vigorously
the world cuts emissions and adapts to rising temperatures, the IPCC
report says. This finding could bolster vulnerable communities’ calls
for compensation to cope with the “loss and damage” that comes with inevitable change.
Nigerian climate activist Philip Jakpor, director of programs for the
Lagos-based nonprofit Corporate Accountability and Public Participation
Africa, said many Africans have endured tremendous losses caused by
global warming. Yet most don’t have the funds needed to recover and
rebuild.
Nigerian climate activist Philip Jakpor, director of programs for the
Lagos-based nonprofit Corporate Accountability and Public Participation
Africa, said many Africans have endured tremendous losses caused by
global warming. Yet most don’t have the funds needed to recover and
rebuild.
Industrialized nations — whose wealth was created using the fossil fuel
emissions now warming the planet — have a “historic responsibility” to
assist, Jakpor said.
“They should pay for the damages from what they have unleashed on the world.”
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| Workers place bags to prevent river erosion in Bangladesh in September. (Munir Uz Zaman/AFP/Getty Images) |
A Dangerous and unequal future
A key aspect of Monday’s report is global inequity, and how the basic
unfairness of climate change crosses continents and spans generations.
The more temperatures rise, the wider the chasm between rich and poor
will probably become, and the harder it will be for all communities to
withstand the intensifying costs.
“That’s one of the clearest things the scientific evidence shows about
the impacts of climate change — the injustice of it,” said Saleemul Huq,
director of the International Centre for Climate Change and Development
in Bangladesh. “It affects poor people more than rich people, but it’s
caused by rich people’s emissions.”
Roughly 80 percent of those at risk of hunger in the worst-case warming
scenarios will live in Asia and Africa. People in low- and middle-income
countries, especially those in rural areas, are most likely to be
displaced by extreme weather.
In Africa, which has generated less than 3 percent of the world’s
cumulative greenhouse gas emissions, people will endure a 118-fold
increase in exposure to extreme heat if the world warms by 4 degrees
Celsius (7.2 degrees Fahrenheit). By contrast, heat exposure in Europe —
the source of one third of all planet-warming pollution — will go up
just fourfold, the report finds.
“The differences in vulnerability around the globe are really striking,”
said Rachel Bezner Kerr, a professor of global development at Cornell
University and a lead author of the IPCC report. “And it’s not just
between the global South and global North, but within countries.”
Higher temperatures are linked to increased rates of violence against
women and girls. People with disabilities are less able to evacuate from
escalating natural disasters. Indigenous communities will suffer
disproportionately as extinctions alter sacred landscapes and deplete
traditional food sources.
The disparity is also intergenerational, scientists make clear. Most
people currently in power will not live to see the most extreme
consequences of continued emissions. It is today’s children whose lives
will be defined by the problems their parents failed to solve.
“I have so many emotions,” said Farzana Faruk Jhumu, a 23-year-old
Fridays for Future activist from Bangladesh. “Sometimes it’s rage, and
sometimes it’s sadness. … I try not to lose hope, but I’m not sure how
much hope I have left.”
Members of Jhumu’s generation will see a fivefold increase in extreme
events if the world warms 3 degrees Celsius (5.4 degrees Fahrenheit) by
the end of the century, the IPCC reports. But under any warming
scenario, people over the age of 55 — a demographic that includes the
vast majority of world leaders and CEOs — will never endure such
frequent catastrophes.
“They are making the decision of our life,” Jhumu said of older
generations. “It’s disappointing they are not even seeing the future
that is not that far away.”
So far, the world’s richest countries have failed to generate the
pledged $100 billion in annual funding to help developing countries
build greener economies and deal with the intensifying catastrophes
caused by climate change — a promise that was enshrined in the 2015
Paris climate accord.
Wealthy nations must make good on that broken pledge, while at the same
time directing a greater share of funding toward adaptation, said Tina
Stege, climate envoy for the Marshall Islands.
With sea levels rising at their fastest rates in more than 3,000 years,
the low-lying atoll nation is bracing for saltwater contamination of
aquifers, the loss of vital fisheries and near-constant floods. Stege
said officials in the Marshall Islands have worked hard to develop
adaptation plans, but like other resource-strained nations that did
little to fuel climate change, it cannot shoulder the costs of worsening
impacts without help from the outside world.
“We don’t have the ability to go it alone,” Stege said. “Honestly, no one else does.”
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