BSS ARTIKEL WEEK 4.1
This BBC article summarizes some of the findings of the recent IPCC reports. Try to get a
sense of some basic facts on climate change and the risks it poses.
Human activity is changing the climate in unprecedented and sometimes irreversible ways, a
major UN scientific report has said.
But scientists say a catastrophe can be avoided if the world acts fast.
The new report also makes clear that the warming we've experienced to date has made
changes to many of our planetary support systems that are irreversible on timescales of
centuries to millennia.
The oceans will continue to warm and become more acidic. Mountain and polar glaciers will
continue melting for decades or centuries.
"The consequences will continue to get worse for every bit of warming," said Prof Hawkins.
- "And for many of these consequences, there's no going back."
This new report says that under all the emissions scenarios considered by the scientists,
both targets will be broken this century unless huge cuts in carbon take place.
, The authors believe that 1.5C will be reached by 2040 in all scenarios. If emissions aren't
slashed in the next few years, this will happen even earlier.
This was predicted in the IPCC's special report on 1.5C in 2018 and this new study now
confirms it.
"We will hit one-and-a-half degrees in individual years much earlier. We already hit it
in two months during the El Niño in 2016,"
The consequences of going past 1.5C over a period of years would be unwelcome in a world
that has already experienced a rapid uptick in extreme events with a temperature rise since
pre-industrial times of 1.1C.
- "We will see even more intense and more frequent heat waves,"
"And we will also see an increase in heavy rainfall events on a global scale, and also
increases in some types of droughts in some regions of the world."
"The report clearly shows that we are already living the consequences of climate change
everywhere. But we will experience further and concurrent changes that increase with every
additional beat of warming."
So what can be done?
While this report is more clear and confident about the downsides to warming, the scientists
are more hopeful that if we can cut global emissions in half by 2030 and reach net zero by
the middle of this century, we can halt and possibly reverse the rise in temperatures.
Reaching net zero involves reducing greenhouse gas emissions as much as possible using
clean technology, then burying any remaining releases using carbon capture and storage, or
absorbing them by planting trees.
"The thought before was that we could get increasing temperatures even after net zero,"
said another co-author, Prof Piers Forster from the University of Leeds, UK.
"But we now expect nature to be kind to us and if we are able to achieve net zero, we
hopefully won't get any further temperature increase; and if we are able to achieve net zero
greenhouse gasses, we should eventually be able to reverse some of that temperature
increase and get some cooling."
