Alarming new climate report: We’re living in a horror movie

WASHINGTON >> Here’s how to interpret the alarming new United Nations-sponsored report on global warming: We are living in a horror movie. The world needs statesmen to lead the way to safety. Instead we have President Trump.

According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which released a report Monday, the impact of human-induced warming is worse than previously feared, and only drastic coordinated action will keep the damage short of catastrophe.

So far, climate change has been a slow-motion calamity. Unfortunately, the report says, that’s about to change.

The burning of fossil fuels on an industrial scale has raised global temperatures by about 1 degree Celsius, or 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit. That may not sound like much, but look at the consequences we’re already seeing: Stronger, slower, wetter tropical storms. Unprecedented heat waves. Devastating floods. Dying coral reefs.

And humankind continues to pump heat-trapping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere at a tragically self-destructive rate. The IPCC calculates that a further temperature rise of about 1 degree — almost inevitable, given our dependence on coal, oil and gas — would be challenging; 2 degrees, however, would be disastrous.

With a 1-degree rise, about 14 percent of global population may suffer deadly heat waves every five years; with a 2-degree rise, it jumps to 37 percent. With a 1-degree rise, an additional 350 million city dwellers worldwide will face water shortages; with a 2-degree rise, 411 million people will. With a 1-degree rise, coral reefs will experience “very frequent mass mortalities”; with a 2-degree rise, they’ll “mostly disappear.”

Under the 1-degree scenario, 69 million people will be newly exposed to flooding; in the 2-degree scenario, there’ll be a 36-inch sealevel rise threatening 80 million people.

This isn’t just another boring compendium of carefully hedged facts and figures. I’ve followed the IPCC’s research since 1992. The new report combines weary fatalism with hair-on-fire alarm. It predicts declining fisheries, failing crops, more widespread risk from tropical diseases, economic dislocation in the most-affected countries and, thus, greater political instability.

The IPCC says emissions need to decline by 40 percent by 2030, and to reach net zero by 2050, if we are to hold warming to one more degree. Yet last year, according to the International Energy Agency, global emissions hit an all-time high.

Since 2016, representatives of 195 nations — including all the big emitters — signed on to the landmark Paris agreement calling for systematic emissions reductions beginning in 2020. But President Trump, who calls climate change a “hoax,” withdrew the U.S. from the pact and is aggressively trying to increase reliance on coal, which has much higher carbon dioxide emissions than other fossil fuels.

U.S. carbon emissions fell slightly in 2017, due to increases in renewable energy. But Trump policies will reverse that trend. Meanwhile, the rest of the world is already moving toward clean energy — a huge economic shift that threatens to leave the U.S. behind.

The IPCC report details that what the world really needs is visionary leadership. As the world’s greatest economic power and its second-largest carbon emitter, the United States is uniquely capable of shepherding a global transition to renewable energy. Instead, the Trump administration rejects the science of climate change and actively favors dirty energy sources over clean ones.

Humanity has no time for such foolishness. “I’m the president of the United States. I’m not the president of the globe,” Trump thundered at a recent rally. On what planet does he think this nation resides?