Scientists deliver ‘final warning’ on climate
crisis: act now or it’s too late
IPCC report says only swift and drastic action can
avert irrevocable damage to world
Mon 20 Mar
2023 13.00 GMT
Scientists
have delivered a “final warning” on the climate crisis, as rising greenhouse
gas emissions push the world to the brink of irrevocable damage that only swift
and drastic action can avert.
The
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), made up of the world’s
leading climate scientists, set out the final part of its mammoth sixth
assessment report on Monday.
The
comprehensive review of human knowledge of the climate crisis took hundreds of
scientists eight years to compile and runs to thousands of pages, but boiled
down to one message: act now, or it will be too late.
The UN
secretary general, António Guterres, said: “This report is a clarion call to
massively fast-track climate efforts by every country and every sector and on
every timeframe. Our world needs climate action on all fronts: everything,
everywhere, all at once.”
In sober
language, the IPCC set out the devastation that has already been inflicted on
swathes of the world. Extreme weather caused by climate breakdown has led to
increased deaths from intensifying heatwaves in all regions, millions of lives
and homes destroyed in droughts and floods, millions of people facing hunger,
and “increasingly irreversible losses” in vital ecosystems.
Monday’s
final instalment, called the synthesis report, is almost certain to be the last
such assessment while the world still has a chance of limiting global
temperature rises to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels, the threshold beyond
which our damage to the climate will rapidly become irreversible.
Kaisa
Kosonen, a climate expert at Greenpeace International, said: “This report is
definitely a final warning on 1.5C. If governments just stay on their current
policies, the remaining carbon budget will be used up before the next IPCC
report [due in 2030].”
More than
3bn people already live in areas that are “highly vulnerable” to climate
breakdown, the IPCC found, and half of the global population now experiences
severe water scarcity for at least part of the year. In many areas, the report
warned, we are already reaching the limit to which we can adapt to such severe
changes, and weather extremes are “increasingly driving displacement” of people
in Africa, Asia, North, Central and South America, and the south Pacific.
All of
those impacts are set to increase rapidly, as we have failed to reverse the
200-year trend of rising greenhouse gas emissions, despite more than 30 years
of warnings from the IPCC, which published its first report in 1990.
The world
heats up in response to the accumulation of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse
gases in the atmosphere, so every year in which emissions continue to rise eats
up the available “carbon budget” and means much more drastic cuts will be
needed in future years.
Yet there
is still hope of staying within 1.5C, according to the report. Hoesung Lee, the
chair of the IPCC, said: “This synthesis report underscores the urgency of
taking more ambitious action and shows that, if we act now, we can still secure
a livable sustainable future for all.”
Temperatures
are now about 1.1C above pre-industrial levels, the IPCC found. If greenhouse
gas emissions can be made to peak as soon as possible, and are reduced rapidly
in the following years, it may still be possible to avoid the worst ravages
that would follow a 1.5C rise.
Richard
Allan, a professor of climate science at the University of Reading, said:
“Every bit of warming avoided due to the collective actions pulled from our
growing, increasingly effective toolkit of options is less worse news for
societies and the ecosystems on which we all depend.”
Guterres
called on governments to take drastic action to reduce emissions by investing
in renewable energy and low-carbon technology. He said rich countries must try
to reach net zero greenhouse gas emissions “as close as possible to 2040”,
rather than waiting for the 2050 deadline most have signed up to.
He said:
“The climate timebomb is ticking. But today’s report is a how-to guide to
defuse the climate timebomb. It is a survival guide for humanity. As it shows,
the 1.5C limit is achievable.”
John Kerry,
the US special presidential envoy for climate, said: “Today’s message from the
IPCC is abundantly clear: we are making progress, but not enough. We have the
tools to stave off and reduce the risks of the worst impacts of the climate
crisis, but we must take advantage of this moment to act now.”
Monday’s
“synthesis report” is the final part of the sixth assessment report (AR6) by
the IPCC, which was set up in 1988 to investigate the climate and provide
scientific underpinning to international policy on the crisis. The first three
sections of AR6, published between August 2021 and April 2022, covered the
physical science behind the climate crisis, and warned irreversible changes
were now almost inevitable; section two covered the impacts, such as the loss
of agriculture, rising sea levels, and the devastation of the natural world;
and the third covered the means by which we can cut greenhouse gases, including
renewable energy, restoring nature and technologies that capture and store
carbon dioxide.
The
“synthesis report” contains no new science, but draws together key messages
from all of the preceding work to form a guide for governments. The next IPCC
report is not due to be published before 2030, making this report effectively
the scientific gold standard for advice to governments in this crucial decade.
The final
section of AR6 was the “summary for policymakers”, written by IPCC scientists
but scrutinised by representatives of governments around the world, who can –
and did – push for changes. The Guardian was told that in the final hours of
deliberations at the Swiss resort of Interlaken over the weekend, the large
Saudi Arabian delegation, of at least 10 representatives, pushed at several
points for the weakening of messages on fossil fuels, and the insertion of
references to carbon capture and storage, touted by some as a remedy for fossil
fuel use but not yet proven to work at scale.
In response
to the report, Peter Thorne, the director of the Icarus climate research centre
at Maynooth University in Ireland, said next year global temperatures could
breach the 1.5C limit, though this did not mean the limit had been breached for
the long term. “We will, almost regardless of the emissions scenario given,
reach 1.5C in the first half of the next decade,” he said. “The real question
is whether our collective choices mean we stabilise around 1.5C or crash
through 1.5C, reach 2C and keep going.”
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