UN laments governments’ inaction on climate

paris — Diplomats gathering in South Korea on Monday will find themselves in the awkward position of vetting and validating a major UN scientific report that underscores the failure of their governments to take stronger action on climate.

The UN special report on global warming of 1.5°C (2.7°F) above preindustrial levels began as a request from the 195 nations that inked the Paris Agreement in 2015.

That landmark pact called for capping the rise in global temperature to “well-below” 2°C, and invited countries to submit voluntary national plans for reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

To the surprise of many — especially scientists, who had based nearly a decade of research on the assumption that 2°C was the politically acceptable guardrail for a climate-safe world — the treaty also called for a good-faith effort to cap warming at the lower threshold.

At the same time, countries asked the UN’s climate science authority, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), to detail what a 1.5°C world would look like, and how hard it might be to prevent a further rise in temperature.

Three years and many drafts later, the answer has come in the form of a 400-page report — grounded in an assessment of 6,000 peer-reviewed studies — that delivers a stark, double-barrelled message: 1.5°C is enough to unleash climate mayhem, and the pathways to avoiding an even hotter world require a swift and complete transformation not just of the global economy, but of society too.

With only one 1°C of warming so far, the world has seen a climate-enhanced crescendo of deadly heatwaves, wild fires and floods, along with superstorms swollen by rising seas. “I don’t know how you can possibly read this and find it anything other than wildly alarming,” said Peter Frumhoff, director of science and policy at the Union of Concerned Scientists, a Washington-based research and advocacy group, referring to the draft Summary for Policy Makers. —