Newsman: United Nations climate change report said that from wildfires to sea level rise and heat waves, climate change is having a dramatic impact on the environment and people’s health and well-being. if urgent action is not taken, humanity will fail to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit), the threshold for a future of more fires, drought, storms, and more. At their presently rising levels, however, greenhouse gas emissions are likely to create twice as much warming: approximately 3.2°C (5.7°F) by 2100. The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) latest report was released on Monday. We already have the solutions reports says, but the only thing preventing us from taking advantage of them is political will and status-quo interests in fossil fuels.
The third and final installment of the sixth UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, shows how renewable energy sources like wind and solar are now economically viable and becoming cheaper by the day.
U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres in a news conference about the report’s findings reproached global leaders in a searing critique, saying the new report highlighted “a litany of broken climate promises” and a catalog of “shame” showing the world is on the wrong track.
“The jury has reached a verdict. And it is damning,” Guterres said. “We are on a fast track to climate disaster.”
“Government and business leaders are saying one thing and doing another. Simply put, they are lying,” he said. “Empty pledges that put us firmly on track towards an unlivable world” U.N. Secretary-Generaladded.
“We are at a crossroads. This is the time for action. We have the tools and know-how required to limit warming and secure a liveable future” IPCC Chair Hoesung Lee said during the news conference announcing the report.
“It’s now or never, if we want to limit global warming to 1.5°C,” said Jim Skea, co-chair of the IPCC working group said at press briefing. “Without immediate and deep emissions reductions across all sectors, it will be impossible.”
Skea noted, however, that “there is increased evidence of climate action.” The rate of increase in greenhouse gas emissions was slower between 2010 and 2019 than over the previous decade; and technologies and policies do now exist that would enable sharp reductions in emissions—if the political will exists to implement them.
According to the report, unless global greenhouse gas emissions peak no later than three years from now and are cut nearly in half by 2030, the world will likely experience extreme climate impacts. More than 230 authors contributed to the report, which summarizes researchers’ best thinking on how to reduce emissions of the greenhouse gases that are causing climate change. The Report strikes a somewhat hopeful tone about energy transition and suggests achievable solutions are in hand. The renewable energy costs are plummeting and investment in electric vehicles has provided a vision of the path forward, the scientists suggest.
The IPCC report argues that “on technological and cost considerations alone, mitigation of emissions to limit warming to 1.5°C is feasible.” The obstacles are “politics and power relationships and status-quo interests blocking climate policies, including fossil fuel phaseout. This includes disinformation campaigns that actively seek to undermine faith in climate science.”
Globally, the world’s top 10 percent of households with the highest emissions per person are responsible for between 34-45 percent of all household greenhouse gas emissions.
The bottom 50 percent of the global population contribute just 13-15 percent of all household emissions.
Those findings are in line with a report on carbon inequality by the Stockholm Environment Institute, which found that the richest 1 percent of the world’s population are responsible for as much greenhouse gas output as twice the pollution of the poorest 3.1 billion people.
Greenhouse gases in Earth’s atmosphere are at their highest levels in human history. Emissions of the gases fell sharply in 2020 as a result of pandemic lockdowns, but in 2021 they equaled or even surpassed the record in 2019, when they were about 12 percent higher than in 2010—and 54 percent higher than in 1990, when the first IPCC report was published.
For there to be any hope of limiting warming to 1.5°C, the use of coal must be slashed by 95 percent worldwide, while consumption of oil and gas has to be reduced by 60 percent and 45 percent, respectively, by 2050. Fortunately, for many people in many places, installing new clean energy is cheaper than operating existing fossil-fuel energy, and often cheaper than installing new fossil-fuel infrastructure.
From 2010 through 2019, the cost of both solar energy and lithium-ion batteries declined on average by 85 percent, while that of wind energy decreased by 55 percent. Such declines have enabled significantly more widespread deployment of those technologies: For example, the use of electric vehicles soared by 100 times over the same decade, and solar power is now 10 times more prevalent worldwide, although such figures vary widely from country to country and region to region
Followings are some key takeaways from the report’s summary.
Politics and resistance are the primary obstacles
Many countries have implemented policies that have enhanced energy efficiency, reduced rates of deforestation, or accelerated the deployment of clean energy technology. Others have pledged reductions in emissions under the Paris Agreement. However, many countries’ targets are not ambitious enough, while other countries have promised to reduce their emissions significantly but show no signs of taking the necessary actions.
Additionally, the report notes that funding of renewable energies “falls well short of what is needed” and, in fact, continues to pale in comparison to the subsidies given to fossil fuels. It concludes that just ending such subsidies could reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 10 percent by 2030.
Building new fossil fuel infrastructure won’t work
Continuing to install new fossil fuel infrastructure without abatement will lock in greenhouse gas emissions, a summary of the report says.
The typical use of the fossil fuel infrastructure that’s already constructed or planned would result in going beyond the 1.5 degree Celsius target.
Carbon capture and storage technology could reduce the risk of stranding these assets, but a shift away from fossil fuels is necessary, the report says.
Deep and rapid cuts to methane critical
Although shorter-lived and less abundant in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide, methane is a much more potent greenhouse gas; it is projected to account for 60 percent of non-CO2 greenhouse gas emissions by mid-century. Because it is less persistent in the atmosphere, however, deep cuts in its emissions can swiftly reduce its impact on warming.
One of the most effective ways to do so is to target “fugitive” emissions—methane that escapes into the atmosphere during the extraction and transport of natural gas, or from long-abandoned oil wells. The IPCC calculates that fugitive emissions account for about 32 percent of the methane released into the atmosphere globally and 6 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions.
CO2 removal will be a key stop
Given the slow progress toward reducing the amount of greenhouse gases spewing into the atmosphere, the report argues that it will be vital in the interim to remove some that are already there. Some estimates claim that 10 gigatons of CO2—more than the total U.S. output each year—will need to be removed from the atmosphere annually by mid-century. Some of the methods for doing this, however, are likely to have greater potential downsides than others.
To this end, the report notes that some carbon removal efforts—such as afforestation (planting forest where previously there was none), and converting land to the growth of biofuels, can have negative impacts on biodiversity and local livelihoods, while ocean fertilization—seeding the upper layers of the ocean with nutrients to promote the growth of plankton—could cause ecosystem changes and acidification in deeper waters.
To have a two-thirds chance of keeping global temperature rise below 2ºC, the IPCC report concludes, models project that between now and 2100 we’ll need to pump somewhere between 170 billion and 900 billion tons of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, using one or both of two technologies.
In the first, BECCS, plants are burned in power plants, and the resulting CO2 is captured at the smokestack and buried underground—leading to a net removal of CO2 from the atmosphere. In the second, called DAC, machines literally suck CO2 out of the air using a chemical reaction.
Both technologies have serious drawbacks, critics say: Growing enough plants for BECCS would divert enormous swathes of farmland to biofield. And DAC is still extremely expensive.
