U.N. climate report likely to deliver stark warnings on global warming

U.N. climate report likely to deliver stark warnings on global warming
# 05 August 2021 13:45 (UTC +04:00)

Eight years after its last update on climate science, the United Nations is set to publish a report Monday that will likely deliver even starker warnings about how quickly the planet is warming – and how damaging the impacts might get, APA reports citing Reuters.

Since the last report by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 2013, both greenhouse gas emissions and the average global temperature have only continued to climb.

The new report will forecast how much more emissions can be pumped into the atmosphere before the average global temperature rises more than 1.5 degrees Celsius. That revised carbon budget may serve as a guide to governments as they map out their own emissions-cutting plans before a major U.N. climate conference in November.

Scientists say the world must halve global emissions by 2030 and cut them to net-zero by 2050 in order to prevent global warming above 1.5C, which could trigger catastrophic impacts across the globe.

But climate change already is fuelling deadly and disastrous weather across the globe. Nearly all of the world’s glaciers are melting faster. Hurricanes are stronger. Just this year, unprecedented rains unleashed floods across parts of central China and Europe, while wildfires are tearing across Siberia, the U.S. West and the Mediterranean.

"The report will cover not only the fact that we are smashing record after record in terms of climate change impacts, but show that the world today is in unchartered territory in terms of sea level rise and ice cover," said Kelly Levin, chief of science, data and systems change at the Bezos Earth Fund philanthropy.

Overall, the report "will underscore the urgency for governments to ramp up climate action,” she said.

And while the 2013 report said it was "extremely likely" that human industry was causing climate change – which suggests scientists were at least 95% confident in that statement – this year’s report will likely use even stronger language.

“Obviously, it is going to be stronger than what we had in the past because of the growing warming of the planet," said Corinne Le Quéré, a climate scientist at the University of East Anglia who has contributed to previous IPCC assessments.

"That's going to be one of the main points. It will be discussed very, very carefully, and scrutinised," Le Quéré told reporters.

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THE OPERATION IS BEING PERFORMED