Global temperatures are expected to increase by at least 1.5 degrees Celsius in the coming decades if immediate action is not taken.
A report by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) predicts that unless rapid scale reductions are brought about in greenhouse gas emissions, the increase in temperatures could go “beyond reach”.
U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres described the report as a “code red for humanity”. “The alarm bells are deafening,” he said in a statement. “This report must sound a death knell for coal and fossil fuels before they destroy our planet.”
It detailed that even if sustained carbon emission reduction is achieved, it will take two to three decades for global temperatures to stabilize. It also warned that some of the impacts, such as an increase in sea level, might not be reversed for hundreds or thousands of years.
The report, titled Climate Change 2021: the Physical Science Basis, was approved on Friday by the 195-member governments of the IPCC. It comes three months ahead of the next major global climate negotiation that will take place in Glasgow in November.
The report predicts that climate change will cause intense rainfall, flooding, and droughts. A rise in sea levels is projected, contributing to increased flooding.
The East Asian region, including China, the Korean peninsula, and Japan, have been explicitly mentioned as areas where high precipitation will occur, leading to landslides.
Valerie Masson-Delmotte, the co-chair of the IPCC’s working group, has some hope and says that it is never too late to reverse climate change. According to her, if carbon emissions are dealt with rapidly so that net zero-emission is achieved by 2050 global warming can be limited to close to 1.5 degrees by mid-century and remain slightly lower than that level by the end of the century.
Human activities have raised temperatures by 11 degrees since 1850. To control this, the Paris climate agreement of 2015 seeks to limit the threshold of 1.5 to 2.0 degrees by 2100.
The warning comes at the backdrop of extreme conditions throughout the world. In the Henan province in central China, large amounts of rainfall were recorded last month. The provincial capital, Zhengzhou, recorded more rain over three days than what it normally experiences in the entire year. The disaster caused 302 deaths – including 292 in Zhengzhou – and over 114 billion yuan (US$17.6 billion) of direct economic losses.
In other parts of the world, wildfires ensue. Greece, Turkey, and California have been engulfed in flames, with California experiencing the second-largest state fire in history as well as a drought.
According to a study by Swiss Re, the global economy could be 11 to 14 percent smaller by 2050 if the Paris Agreement commitments are not met, with global temperatures rising 2 to 2.6 degrees from pre-industrial levels.
