By Paul Homewood
It’s the same old!!
The world is rapidly approaching catastrophic levels of heating with international climate goals set to slip out of reach unless immediate and radical action is taken, according to a new UN-backed report.
The climate time-bomb is ticking,” said António Guterres, Secretary-General of the United Nations, in a statement to mark the launch of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s synthesis report on Monday. “Humanity is on thin ice – and that ice is melting fast,” he added.
The report draws on the findings of hundreds of scientists to provide a comprehensive assessment of how the climate crisis is unfolding.
The science is not new – the report pulls together what the IPCC has already set out in a cluster of other reports over the last few years – but it paints a very stark picture of where the world is heading.
This report is the most dire and troubling assessment yet of the spiralling climate impacts we all face if systemic changes are not made now,” Sara Shaw, program coordinator at Friends of the Earth International, said in a statement.
The impacts of planet-warming pollution are already more severe than expected and we are hurtling towards increasingly dangerous and irreversible consequences, the report says.
While the goal of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above preindustrial levels is still possible, the report noted, the pathway to achieving it is rapidly closing as global production of planet-heating pollution continues to increase – emissions grew by nearly 1% last year.
Concentrations of carbon pollution in the atmosphere are at their highest level for more than two million years and the rate of temperature rise over the last half a century is the highest in 2,000 years.
The impacts of the climate crisis continue to fall hardest on poorer, vulnerable countries that have done least to cause it.
This latest report is nothing new, merely the summary agreed by governments of the original AR6 published two years ago. And in AR6 there was nothing to justify this sort of hyperbole.
Yes, the climate has warmed slightly since the Little Ice Age, but there is no evidence whatsoever that weather is becoming more extreme across the board, and undoubtedly some regions have benefitted from the warming.
The claim that we are approaching catastrophic levels of heating is patently absurd, given that we have already had 1C of warming, which the human race has somehow managed to survive intact!
And, of course, we have been here many times before. In 1989, for instance, the UN warned:
A senior U.N. environmental official says entire nations could be wiped off the face of the Earth by rising sea levels if the global warming trend is not reversed by the year 2000.
Coastal flooding and crop failures would create an exodus of ″eco- refugees,′ ′ threatening political chaos, said Noel Brown, director of the New York office of the U.N. Environment Program, or UNEP.
He said governments have a 10-year window of opportunity to solve the greenhouse effect before it goes beyond human control.
https://apnews.com/article/bd45c372caf118ec99964ea547880cd0
In 1995, based on the first IPCC report, experts claimed that:
“ At the most likely rate of rise most of the beaches on the East Coast of the United States would be gone in 25 years.”
And in 2006, Al Gore claimed that:
“unless drastic measures to reduce greenhouse gases are taken within the next 10 years, the world will reach a point of no return”
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/2006-al-gore-does-sundance/
The UN was back at it again in 2008, with the President of the General Assembly saying:
“It has been estimated that there would be between 50 million and 200 million environmental migrants by 2010”
https://press.un.org/en/2008/ga10725.doc.htm
Most absurd of all was a Pentagon report on climate change in 2004, which claimed:
- By 2007 violent storms would smash coastal barriers, rendering large parts of the Netherlands uninhabitable. Cities such as The Hague would have to be abandoned.
• Between 2010 and 2020, Europe would be hardest hit by climatic change, with an average annual temperature drop of 6°F (3°C). Climate in Britain would become colder and drier,
as weather patterns began to resemble Siberia.
• Deaths from war and famine would run into the millions, until the population had been reduced sufficiently to allow the Earth to cope.
• Riots and internal conflict would tear apart India, South Africa and Indonesia.
• A ‘significant drop’ in the planet’s ability to sustain its present population would become apparent over the next 20 years.
• Millions would be prevented from growing crops, either by climate change directly or by sea-level rise. Rich areas such as the US and Europe would become ‘virtual fortresses’ to prevent millions of climate migrants.
• Mega-droughts would affect the world’s major breadbaskets, including America’s Midwest, where strong winds would bring soil loss.
• China’s huge population and food demand made it particularly vulnerable. Bangladesh would become nearly uninhabitable because of rising sea levels.
The UN becomes ever more desperate and its message increasingly apocalyptic, as most of the world continues to ignore its message and carry on with business as usual.
via NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
March 21, 2023 at 05:17AM
Iowa Climate Science Education 