The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concluded that the 1.5C temperature goal of the Paris Agreement would likely be breached around 2030, a decade earlier than it itself projected just three years ago.
A bombshell climate science report “must sound a death knell” for coal, oil and gas, United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said Monday, warning that fossil fuels were destroying the planet.
Guterres called the IPCC’s assessment, the most detailed review of climate science ever conducted, “code red for humanity”.
Here are the major conclusions of the report:
– In its first major scientific assessment since 2014, the IPCC said that Earth’s average surface temperature is projected to hit 1.5 or 1.6 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels at around 2030, no matter what trajectory greenhouse gas emissions take in the meantime.
-In his most frontal assault yet on the fossil fuel industry that powers the global economy, Guterres said “immediate action” was needed to decarbonise the energy sector.
– Atmospheric levels of planet-warming CO2 are currently at their highest in at least the last two million years, with methane and nitrous oxide levels at their highest since 800,000 years ago. Despite a record drop in carbon pollution last year driven by pandemic restrictions, the IPCC found “no detectable decrease” in the rate of greenhouse gas accumulation.
– At slightly higher levels of global heating, what is today once-a-century coastal flooding will happen every year by 2100, fuelled by storms gorged with extra moisture and rising seas.
– Another looming danger is “tipping points”, invisible thresholds, triggered by rising temperatures, for irreversible changes in Earth’s climate system. Disintegrating ice sheets holding enough water to raise seas a dozen metres; the melting of permafrost laden with double the carbon in the atmosphere; the transition of the Amazon from tropical forest to savannah, these potential catastrophes “cannot be ruled out,” the report cautions.
– Our natural allies in the fight against climate change, meanwhile, are suffering battle fatigue. Since about 1960, forests, soil and oceans have steadily absorbed 56 percent of all the CO2 humanity has chucked into the atmosphere — even as those emissions have increased by half. But these carbon sinks are becoming saturated, according to the IPCC, and the percentage of human-induced carbon they soak up is likely to decline as the century unfolds.
– By mid-century, the 1.5C threshold will have been breached across the board, by a tenth of a degree along the most ambitious pathway, and by nearly a full degree at the opposite extreme.
– There is a silver lining: in the most ambitious if-we-do-everything-right scenario, global temperatures — after “overshooting” the 1.5C target — fall back to 1.4C by 2100.
– More generally, the 2021 IPCC report includes many more findings reached with “high confidence” than before. Sea rising higher, more quickly Global oceans have risen about 20 centimetres (eight inches) since 1900, and the rate of increase has nearly tripled in the last decade. Crumbling and melting ice sheets atop Antarctica and especially Greenland have replaced glacier melt as the main driver.
– The report includes more data than ever before on methane (CH4), the second most important greenhouse gas after CO2, and warns that failure to curb emissions could undermine Paris Agreement goals.
– Sea levels are rising everywhere, but will likely increase up to 20 percent above the global average along many coastlines.
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