We still have a chance to halt global warming

The following is an excerpt from an editorial in the Observer:

Thirty years ago this week, the population of Earth was given official notification that it faced a threat of unprecedented magnitude.

Emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, spewed into the atmosphere from factories and vehicles burning fossil fuels, were pinpointed, definitively, as triggers of future climate change. Melting icecaps, rising sea levels and increasing numbers of extreme weather events would be the norm for the 21st century unless action were taken, warned the authors of the first assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Three decades later, it is clear that we have recklessly ignored that warning. Fossil fuels still supply 80 per cent of the world’s energy, carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere continue to rise and global temperatures are still increasing.

The world could easily heat by three degrees C by the end of the century at this rate, warn scientists. The impact on the world will, by then, be catastrophic.

It is the government members of the IPCC who are at fault for ignoring their own scientists’ warnings.

Thanks to the IPCC, we are at least aware of the problem that now faces our world. We know exactly how much fossil fuel we have left to burn if we want to limit global temperature rises to a relatively safe rise of 1.5 C.

Individual nations have until next year — at the United Nations climate change conference in November — to announce how they will achieve those reductions in oil, gas and coal burning in order to make that target possible and to halt global heating. It is an achievable aspiration even at this late date.