Another round of IPCC crystal ball gazing into the imagined climate future comes up with the usual alarmist visions, as a prelude to COP29. These are the people who think a planet with a southern ice cap of 14 million square kilometres and an average thickness of over 2 kilometres is getting too hot, and that they know how to fix it. The Met Office meanwhile reports that ‘the UK summer of 2024 had a mean temperature 0.22°C below the 1991-2020 average’, which makes it ‘off track’ in global warming prediction-speak.
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Humanity has missed its chance of keeping global warming below 1.5C and it will take “heroic efforts” to stay below 2C this century, the scientist leading the global effort to understand climate change has warned.
Jim Skea, chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), said a failure to sufficiently curb carbon emissions had left the world on track to warm by 3C by 2100, reports The Telegraph.
This average masks variations between land and sea, with western Europe and the UK facing even greater warming – perhaps as much as 5C by the end of the century.
“We are potentially headed towards 3C of global warming by 2100, if we carry on with the policies we have at the moment,” said Skea.
“Obviously temperature rises over land will be higher than over the ocean. We don’t know how warm it will get [over land] but I know it may be more than the global average.”
The Met Office has tried to project the UK impacts. By 2070, it says, winters will be up to 4.5C warmer but 30pc wetter, meaning more flooding. Summer will be up to 6C warmer, with frequent droughts and surging numbers of heat-related deaths.
Skea said: “It’s very clear climate change is no longer decades in the future. It’s very obvious it’s happening now, so we need to adapt.”
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His warning about humanity’s failure to stop the world getting warmer comes just weeks before Ed Miliband, the Energy Secretary, will lead a UK delegation to Azerbaijan, this year’s host of the United Nation’s annual COP climate negotiations.
Full article here [paywalled].
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Image: Fine summer weather [credit: BBC]
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October 6, 2024 at 07:58AM
Iowa Climate Science Education 