“A Code Red for Humanity”: Major U.N. Report Warns of Climat

Hard to overstate the significance of this topic. Unfortunately, the material in here will become more and more depressing as time goes on. Not much hope of any alternative to that.

“A Code Red for Humanity”: Major U.N. Report Warns of Climat

Postby admin » Tue Aug 10, 2021 5:09 am

“A Code Red for Humanity”: Major U.N. Report Warns of Climate Catastrophe If Urgent Action Not Taken
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow
August 09, 2021
https://www.democracynow.org/2021/8/9/ipcc_report



GUESTS
Kim Cobb: professor of Earth and atmospheric sciences at Georgia Tech.
Bob Kopp: professor and director of the Institute of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences at Rutgers University.

In its first major report in nearly a decade, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has warned the Earth could face runaway global temperature changes unless drastic efforts are made to reduce greenhouse gases. The IPCC says humans are “unequivocally” to blame for the climate crisis, which has already caused “widespread and rapid changes.” Scientists conclude average global temperatures will likely rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius, or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, above preindustrial levels by 2040 based on carbon emissions already in the atmosphere. The report also warns temperatures will continue to rapidly warm after 2040 unless immediate action is taken now. For more, we speak with two lead authors of the new IPCC report: Kim Cobb, professor of Earth and atmospheric sciences at Georgia Tech, and Bob Kopp, professor and director of the Institute of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences at Rutgers University. “The changes we’re seeing now are widespread. They’re rapid. They’re intensifying. They’re unprecedented in thousands of years,” says Kopp. “It’s indisputable that these changes are linked to human activities.”

Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: In its first major report in nearly a decade, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has warned the Earth could face runaway global warming unless drastic efforts are made to eliminate greenhouse gases. The IPCC said humans are, quote, “unequivocally” to blame for the climate crisis, which has already caused “widespread and rapid changes.” Scientists concluded average global temperatures will likely rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius, or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, above preindustrial levels by 2040 based on carbon emissions already in the atmosphere. The report also warns temperatures will continue to rapidly warm after 2040 unless drastic action is taken now.

U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres called the report a “code red for humanity.” He said, quote, “If we combine forces now, we can avert climate catastrophe. But, as today’s report makes clear, there is no time for delay and no room for excuses,” he said.

The IPCC held a news conference this morning to release the 3,000-page report, which was worked on by over 200 scientists. Inger Andersen, executive director of the United Nations Environment Programme, addressed the scientists involved in the project.

INGER ANDERSEN: You’ve been telling us for over three decades of the dangers of allowing the planet to warm. The world listened but didn’t hear. The world listened, but it did not act strongly enough. And as a result, climate change is a problem that is here now. Nobody is safe, and it’s getting worse faster. …

We understand that climate change exacerbates already grave risks to biodiversity and natural and managed habitats. Ecosystem degradation damages nature’s ability to reduce the force of climate change. And as the IPCC Working Group I report reminds us, reducing greenhouse gases will not only slow climate change but will improve air quality. It’s all connected.

AMY GOODMAN: Greenpeace UK Executive Director John Sauven said the effects of the climate crisis can already be seen across the globe.

JOHN SAUVEN: You can just read the headlines — you know, the wildfires out of control in Greece and Turkey, the heat domes in California and, you know, British Columbia in Canada, the wildfires out of control in Siberia, the floods in Germany and in China. You just look anywhere around the world, and you see climate catastrophe unfolding. All this report is doing, really, is putting the science behind this, saying that we are now certain this is human-induced.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re joined now by two of the lead authors of the IPCC report. Bob Kopp is professor and director of the Rutgers Institute of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences at Rutgers University. And Kim Cobb is professor of Earth and atmospheric sciences at Georgia Tech.

Professor Cobb, let’s begin with you. You’re one of the lead authors of this report. Can you talk about the scope and the significance of what you found?

KIM COBB: Well, this report is obviously an unprecedented new foundation for our science and our world at this critical moment. It is something that involved hundreds of authors over the last three years and really assessed the relevant scientific literature across 14,000 different articles in the published, peer-reviewed literature to make assessments as to where we are with human-caused climate change and where we’re going and what lies ahead in the choices that we have to make. So, really, a stunning, historic pillar in our field and a reminder of the futures that we have to choose in the next decades.

AMY GOODMAN: The U.N. secretary-general has called the IPCC report “code red for humanity.” What surprised you most about the findings, hundreds of scientists around the world assessing so many of the studies that have taken place over the last years?

KIM COBB: Well, I think one of the things to remember is how far the science has come. We’re going from “virtually certain” human-caused climate change in the last report to “unequivocal” wording for this report in terms of human influence on climate, and thinking about piling up on the absolutely factual column more and more and more aspects of the impacts of climate change. And this report, I think, makes a very strong emphasis on the rising climate and weather extremes, that have been more uncertain in previous reports. This year, the science has — over the last years, the science has matured to the point that a lot of strong wording in this report around the links between human-caused climate change and any number of different climate extremes.

AMY GOODMAN: Professor Robert Kopp, talk about the major findings of the report.

BOB KOPP: Sure. So, as my colleague was saying, this report is, in some cases, a sort of an exclamation mark on what the previous reports have already said. So, we’ve known for decades that the world is warming. We know that the changes we’re seeing now are widespread. They’re rapid. They’re intensifying. They’re unprecedented in thousands of years. Carbon dioxide levels are higher than they’ve been in at least 2 million years. Temperatures are higher than they’ve been in at least 100,000 years. Sea level is rising faster than it has in at least 3,000 years. And it’s indisputable that these changes are linked to human activity. And these changes are affecting every inhabited region of the Earth.

Some of them are already locked in. But even for the ones that are going to respond most slowly to reductions in greenhouse gases, like changes in the ice sheets and sea level, we still have the opportunity to slow the rate and ultimate extent of warming. And other changes, like the rise in temperature, can be stopped pretty quickly if we bring our greenhouse gas emissions to net zero.

AMY GOODMAN: What are some —

BOB KOPP: But —

AMY GOODMAN: Go ahead.

BOB KOPP: Yeah, sorry. In order to hit the ambitious target laid out in the Paris Agreement of limiting warming to well below 2 degrees C, we’re going to need immediate, rapid and large-scale reductions in greenhouse gas emissions.

But the other point I want to make sure comes across, because I think it — you know, you hear this a lot, is that we shouldn’t be thinking about this as though there is a magic line at one-and-a-half degrees or at any level below which we’re safe and above which we’re not. You’re already talking about, as we said, already experiencing more extremes, so we’re already experiencing enhanced hazards as a result of climate change. And every bit of warming, whether it’s above or below one-and-a-half degrees C, increases the risks that we face. So, anything we can to limit the amount of warming will reduce the hazards we’re creating for ourselves.

AMY GOODMAN: You’re an oceans expert, Robert Kopp, so if you can talk about what the greatest sources of sea level rise are expected to be in the next century, and what has happened so far, the major causes of sea level rise?

BOB KOPP: Sure. So, as I already said, sea level is rising now at a faster rate than it has in at least 3,000 years, and it’s rising at an accelerating rate. And this is due to two main factors. The first is the loss of ice on land, from glaciers and from the polar ice sheets in Antarctica and Greenland. And the second is the warming of the oceans as the planet heats up. And there’s been a continuing acceleration since about 1970 with ice sheets, in particular, the Greenland and Antarctica ice sheet, driving the increase in the rate of sea level rise over the last 20 years. And of all of the factors that are driving sea level rise, we can clearly tie the expansion of the ocean, the melting of glaciers and the melting of the Greenland ice sheet to human-caused activity. And finally, this is already having effects around the world. So, since the 1960s, we’ve seen nearly a doubling in many coastal sites of the frequency of high water levels.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to break and then come back to our discussion with professors Bob Kopp and Kim Cobb, two of the lead reporters on the new IPCC report, just released this morning. We’ll also go to Bangladesh — or, speak to a leading Bangladeshi scientist. Stay with us.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: “Trust” by The Weather Station. Tamara Lindeman says the new album Ignorance is inspired by climate grief.
admin
Site Admin
 
Posts: 36125
Joined: Thu Aug 01, 2013 5:21 am

Re: “A Code Red for Humanity”: Major U.N. Report Warns of Cl

Postby admin » Tue Aug 10, 2021 5:10 am

Greta Thunberg: New IPCC Report Is a Wake-Up Call for All About the Escalating Climate Emergency
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow
August 09, 2021
https://www.democracynow.org/2021/8/9/g ... pcc_report

Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg says the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change should serve as a “wake-up call” for governments to do more to lower emissions. In its first major report in nearly a decade, the IPCC says the Earth could face runaway global warming unless drastic efforts are made to eliminate greenhouse gases and that humans are “unequivocally to blame for the climate crisis,” which is already causing widespread and rapid changes. “The climate crisis is not going away,” Thunberg said. “It’s only escalating, and it’s only growing more intense by the hour.”

Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, as we turn now to Greta Thunberg, who has just responded to the new IPCC report.

GRETA THUNBERG: We have not once been treating this crisis like an actual crisis. And, of course, media is reporting now about extreme weather events and consequences of the climate crisis, but, then again, we also have to remember that these are all just symptoms of the climate crisis. We are not talking about the root cause itself, the things that is actually fueling these events. We are not holding people in power accountable. We are not talking about the current, best-available science, what it says, and how the situation looks like now. And we are especially not talking about the gap between what politicians are saying and what they are actually doing. …

This report doesn’t tell us what to do. It doesn’t say you have to do this, and then you have to do this. It doesn’t provide us with such solutions or tell us that you need to do this. That’s up for us. We are the ones who need to take the decisions, and we are the ones who need to be brave and ask the difficult questions to ourselves, like: What do we value? Are we ready to take action to ensure future and present living conditions?

So, I hope that this can be a wake-up call and that it really gives perspective and that it, once again, can be a reminder that the climate crisis has not gone away, it’s only escalating, and it’s only growing more intense by the hour.

AMY GOODMAN: That’s Greta Thunberg responding to the new IPCC report. She was responding from Stockholm, Sweden.
admin
Site Admin
 
Posts: 36125
Joined: Thu Aug 01, 2013 5:21 am

Re: “A Code Red for Humanity”: Major U.N. Report Warns of Cl

Postby admin » Tue Aug 10, 2021 5:11 am

From Fires to Floods to Sea Level Rise, Human-Induced Climate Crisis Is Severely Disrupting Earth
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow
August 09, 2021
https://www.democracynow.org/2021/8/9/c ... pcc_report

GUESTS
Saleemul Huq: climate scientist and the director of the International Center for Climate Change and Development in Bangladesh.
Bob Kopp: professor and director of the Institute of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences at Rutgers University.
Kim Cobb: professor of Earth and atmospheric sciences at Georgia Tech.

We continue to discuss the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, which details the damage of climate change already underway around the world and warns that much worse is yet to come unless governments drastically reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. The report tallies the losses from human-induced climate change “in an absolutely scientifically verifiable and attributable manner,” says climate scientist Saleemul Huq, director of the International Center for Climate Change and Development in Bangladesh. “The path to keeping it below 1.5 degrees is diminishing by the hour.” We also continue with Kim Cobb and Bob Kopp, two lead authors of the new IPCC report.

Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now! As we talk about the report, the 3,000-page report, almost a decade in the making, we are joined by two leading IPCC scientists. And we go to Bangladesh to speak, as well, with Saleemul Huq, climate scientist, director of the International Center for Climate Change and Development in Bangladesh. He’s been a longtime IPCC lead author, now joining us from Dhaka.

Your response to this report, Saleem?

SALEEMUL HUQ: Thank you very much, Amy.

My response is that this report has actually ushered in what I call the new era of loss and damage from human-induced climate change in an absolutely scientifically verifiable and attributable manner. There is no question at all that what we are seeing on our TV screens across the world, in terms of the wildfires, the heat dome effect in the North America, floods in China and India, are now — the severity of all of these have been increased because of human-induced climate change by enhancing the global temperature 1.2 degrees above preindustrial. And the path to keeping it below 1.5 degrees is diminishing by the hour, as Greta Thunberg said.

AMY GOODMAN: Did anything surprise you in this report, Saleem? And describe specifically what’s happening in Bangladesh.

SALEEMUL HUQ: So, this is not a surprising report. It’s an assessment of, as you have heard, 14,000 scientific papers which already exist and we’ve known about. It brings it all together and makes the case for urgency, I think, very, very strong.

The new aspect of it, I would say, as has already been alluded to by one of the lead authors, is that the science on attribution of extreme events has become a lot better. It used to be the case that these extreme weather events that we have could not be tied to human-induced climate change, as they are now able to be done. So, the heat dome effect in North America, for example, could not have happened without the human-induced climate change taking place. The severity of the wildfires in Southern Europe would not be so severe without human-induced climate change, and so on and so forth. These events are not caused by climate change, but they are becoming much, much, much more severe because of human-induced climate change having already raised global mean temperature by 1.2 degrees above preindustrial.

So, in Bangladesh, where I live, we’ve known this for over a decade. This is all old news. None of this is new news. It happens all the time. We are a country of 170 million people living on less than 150,000 square square kilometers on the delta of two of the world’s biggest rivers, the Ganges and the Brahmaputra, and also susceptible to major cyclones coming in from the Bay of Bengal into hitting our country.

So, we’ve seen, just a year ago, a year and a bit ago, a supercyclone hit us, called Amphan, in May of 2020. It became a supercyclone while it was in the Bay of Bengal because the sea surface temperature was two degrees above normal. In past decades, supercyclones of that magnitude have actually killed hundreds of thousands of people. The good news is they don’t anymore. Bangladesh has probably the best cyclone warning and evacuation system in the whole world. Three million people were evacuated and took shelter, and the death rate was in the few dozens of people, most of whom were fishermen who were out at sea and didn’t get back to land in time. Three million people on land took shelter and survived. But nevertheless, the cyclone did a lot of damage. People lost their homes, their crops, their livelihood, infrastructure. So, even though the death rate has been brought down considerably, the destruction was not able to be prevented. And there will be more of that coming in the future.

AMY GOODMAN: Saleemul Huq, the biggest greenhouse gas emitters are China and the United States. What do these two countries have to do?

SALEEMUL HUQ: These two countries are the key. The United States is still — even though China is the biggest greenhouse gas emitter now, the United States is still cumulatively the biggest contributor to the fact that we now have global temperature above 1.2 degrees centigrade. So, both these countries are going to have to step up their game. And, to me, they are key. If they can do it, everybody else will follow. They’ve done some — one must give credit for that — but they haven’t done enough.

And hopefully this report will spur them on to take even faster, more drastic action to wean themselves off fossil fuels, on coal, petroleum and natural gas, as quickly as possible and segue into a cleaner energy world of renewable energies, like solar, wind, together with storage, which is a key factor in utilizing these intermittent energy sources like wind and solar. With these three technologies, we should be able to wean ourselves off fossils very quickly and go into a new world based on renewable energies. The faster we do that, the better off everybody, including Americans and Chinese, will be. America and China are also quite vulnerable to the impacts of climate change, as they just found out in the last few weeks. So they’re not going to be able to adapt as quickly, either. So, the sooner they can reduce their emissions, the better. And the rest of the world will follow. They are the two key players.

AMY GOODMAN: Let me put this question to Robert Kopp. You have these massive issues of extreme weather. You have the western wildfires — California, Oregon, Washington — and yet it’s Denver, Colorado, that experiences the worst air quality in the world of any major city this weekend because of those fires in the west. You had the fires in Greece, the flooding in Bangladesh, where Saleemul Huq is. Is this the best we can hope for in the future? Is there any way to even mitigate against these kind of extreme weathers? Is this as good as it gets?

BOB KOPP: You know, what we’re basically facing is a world with about 1.1 degrees Celsius of warming. And so, even if we’re looking forward, we’re talking about one-and-a-half or 2 degrees C, and what we can say is that every increment of warming is going to make these sorts of impacts more severe. So, in order to stop things from getting worse, we need to get — as my colleague was saying, we need to get global greenhouse gas emissions to net zero, which requires a global effort. And these sorts of changes we see are basically what we see with the level of warming that we have, and we’re not coming back to this level of warming. So these are indeed going to get worse. But I think it’s important for us to bear in mind that we have very real control over how much worse they get.

AMY GOODMAN: Professor Cobb, you are a specialist and you’ve done a lot of work around preserving coral reefs in the world. Can you talk about the effects of climate change on these coral reefs and why this is so significant, an indicator of what’s happening all over the world, even outside the coral reefs?

KIM COBB: Yes. The report flags coral reefs as an incredibly vulnerable ecosystem to current warming levels, as well as future warming levels. Corals live in a relatively narrow temperature tolerance, where if that temperature is exceeded, they bleach first — and that’s something that has hit the headlines in recent years. And if those conditions persist for even a matter of weeks, the corals will die.

And in 2016, we had a global-scale marine heat wave associated with one of the largest El Niño events on record, which is a natural climate cycle that, when superimposed on current warming levels of just over 1 degrees, was enough to bring to our records this historic coral bleaching and mortality event that swept every tropical ocean basin in the world. And so, many of us who study coral reefs were taken aback by just how quickly these extreme temperatures are at our doorstep and the absolutely devastating losses that reefs incurred in that year, a real wake-up call with respect to the ongoing risks on reef systems. It’s really important to remember that these reef systems are critical to the economies of so many island nations and tropical nations around the world, and provide the vast source of protein for over a billion people.

AMY GOODMAN: Professor Saleemul Huq, I wanted to ask you about these massive incidents of extreme weather, the floods in Europe and South Asia, the wildfires in Greece, the United States, as well as Siberia. Can you talk about how — so often in the past, we saw this in poorer countries, but now we’re seeing it in the industrialized world repeatedly, relentlessly. Can you talk about the change in media coverage because of that?

SALEEMUL HUQ: Absolutely. So, as I said earlier, in Bangladesh, and indeed in the rest of the Global South, this is not news at all. We’ve known this for the last decade. We’ve been suffering. We’ve been dealing with it as best we can, with the rest of the global media not taking much interest — maybe a few seconds to report on a flood or a drought or a hurricane, and that was it. Now that it’s happening in the rich world, in Europe and in the United States, it’s getting a lot more wall-to-wall television coverage. I’ve been watching TV all day here in Dhaka about the Greek wildfires in Greece. I’m sure the Greeks never saw wall-to-wall coverage of what happened in Bangladesh when we had floods and cyclones. So, that’s a good thing, you know, in everybody now realizing we’re in the same boat and facing the same storm, even if we’re not all in exactly the same kind of boat.

But one of the interesting issues here is what the rich countries can actually learn from the poorer countries, like Bangladesh. I mentioned that Bangladesh has brought down the death rate of these events in a very, very significant fashion, by providing early warning and evacuation for people. The number of deaths that we saw in Germany, in one of the richest countries in the world — nearly 200 Germans actually died from flash floods — would never have happened in Bangladesh. We would have evacuated them. We do evacuate everybody that’s in the path of floods or in cyclones. In Germany, they weren’t able to do that. So, Germany could learn a lot from Bangladesh, and so could the United States, on how to deal with these impacts that they have not been used to, but we are used to doing them.

AMY GOODMAN: As we wrap up, Saleemul Huq, if you can talk about the significance of the climate summit that’s taking place in Glasgow, if in fact it happens as an in-person event or just a virtual one because of COVID, but the significance of this summit?

SALEEMUL HUQ: I think the Glasgow summit, the COP26, is going to be perhaps the most significant COP that we’ve had. Just a reminder that this was actually supposed to have been held last year, in December 2020, and it got postponed because of the COVID-19 pandemic, for valid reasons. The COVID-19 pandemic didn’t allow it to be held, so it was postponed by 12 months. But that’s a very critical 12 months, because climate change didn’t take 12 months off. It’s actually taking place. And I would say it actually crossed a threshold, which we’ve just seen with the IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report, that we are now living in a climate change world.

And so, as I said, we are now in the era of having to deal with loss and damage from human-induced climate change. And that’s going to be one of the topics that the vulnerable countries are going to bring up — indeed, they’ve already brought it up — in COP26 for treating it seriously, which has not been done so far. We’ve been talking about it for a long time; we’ve not been getting anywhere with it. Now it’s for the rich countries to recognize it’s the reality and do what they’re supposed to do, which is implement what they agreed to implement in Paris: keep the global temperature below 1.5 degrees and provide $100 billion a year to the developing countries to tackle climate change. They promised but didn’t deliver.

AMY GOODMAN: We want to thank you all for being with us, Saleemul Huq, director of the International Center for Climate Change and Development in Bangladesh, also want to thank Bob Kopp, Rutgers Institute of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences, speaking to us from New Brunswick, New Jersey, and Kim Cobb, professor of Earth and atmospheric sciences at Georgia Tech.

This is Democracy Now! When we come back, we go to a tenant organizer in Kansas City about how President Biden’s new eviction moratorium for much of the country doesn’t go far enough. Stay with us.
admin
Site Admin
 
Posts: 36125
Joined: Thu Aug 01, 2013 5:21 am


Return to Planet on Fire

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 1 guest