United Nations scientists have claimed today that humans must make drastic changes to the way they live in order to stave off the worst effects of climate change.
The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has just published guidance on what the world can do to avoid an extremely bleak future.
According to the BBC:
First, the bad news – even if all the policies to cut carbon that governments had put in place by the end of 2020 were fully implemented, the world will still warm by 3.2C this century.
This finding has drawn the ire of the UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres.
“Some government and business leaders are saying one thing – but doing another. Simply put, they are lying. And the results will be catastrophic.”
That sort of temperature rise would see our planet hit by “unprecedented heatwaves, terrifying storms, and widespread water shortages.”
To avoid that fate, the world must keep the rise in temperatures at or under 1.5C this century, say researchers.
The good news is that this latest IPCC summary shows that it can be done, in what Mr Guterres calls a “viable and financially sound manner.”
But keeping temperatures down will require massive changes to energy production, industry, transport, our consumption patterns and the way we treat nature.
To stay under 1.5C according to the IPCC means that carbon emissions from everything that we do, buy, use or eat must peak by 2025, and tumble rapidly after that, reaching net-zero by the middle of this century.
To put it in context, the amount of CO2 that the world has emitted in the last decade is the same amount that’s left to us to stay under this key temperature threshold.
“I think the report tells us that we’ve reached the now or never point of limiting warming to 1.5C,” said IPCC lead author Heleen De Coninck, who’s Professor of Socio-Technical Innovation and Climate Change at Eindhoven University of Technology.
Speaking to BBC News she said: “We have to peak our greenhouse gas emissions before 2025 and after that, reduce them very rapidly. And we will have to do negative emissions or carbon dioxide removal in the second half of the century, shortly after 2050 in order to limit warming to 1.5C….”
“It’s game over for the fossil fuels that are fuelling both wars and climate chaos,” said Kaisa Kosonen from Greenpeace, who was an observer at the IPCC approval session.
“There’s no room for any new fossil fuel developments and the coal and gas plants we already have need to close early.”
But diets and lifestyles will also need changing, with huge scope for major carbon savings according to the authors.
