The UN Climate Report: All Is Not Well--but All Is Not Lost

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

Today the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released an alarming new report on the state of the climate: 14,000 pieces of scientific literature synthesized by hundreds of experts. It’s a full-throated declaration of what scientists know about how humanity has set the planet on fire: How hot it’s gotten and how hot it’s going to get, how much polar ice is melting, how droughts and storms are worsening, how dire the path forward looks—unless we take drastic and immediate steps to stop loading the atmosphere with carbon.

“We've known for decades that the world is warming, but this report tells us that recent changes in the climate are widespread, rapid, and intensifying—unprecedented in thousands of years,” said Ko Barrett, IPCC vice chair and senior adviser for climate at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, at a press conference Sunday announcing the report. “The bottom line is that unless there are immediate, rapid, and large-scale reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, limiting warming to 1.5 degrees C—or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit—will be beyond reach.”

That limit is the optimistic goal of the Paris Climate Agreement: to keep global average temperatures to 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels, and to avoid 2 degrees of warming. The new report notes that the temperature has already crept up by 1.1 degrees, and is on track to hit 1.5 sometime in the early- to mid-2030s if things don’t change.

That’s a significant update from a previous IPCC report that predicted that the planet would hit the 1.5 milestone at around the year 2040, says Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist and the director of climate and energy at the Breakthrough Institute, who wasn’t involved in the report. “Similarly, we're passing 2 degrees somewhere between the early 2040s and early 2050s as a most likely estimate in the higher-emission scenarios,” he says, referring to one of the five outcomes modeled in the new report.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/weather/topstories/the-un-climate-report-all-is-not-well%e2%80%94but-all-is-not-lost/ar-AAN6fR7

[captain queeg]

1. Based on what I've seen lately, if everyone started acting responsibly concerning global warming

And we started making a difference, as soon as there was some success a lot of people would declare victory or over reaction and go right back the their old ways. We are so screwed.