Ignoring climate change will yield “untold suffering”
Nearly 14,000 scientists have signed a new climate emergency paper, warning that “untold suffering” awaits the human race if we don’t start tackling global warming head-on, effective immediately. The new paper is an update of a 2019 paper that declared a global climate emergency and evaluated Earth’s vital signs based on 31 variables, including greenhouse gas emissions, surface temperature changes, glacial ice mass loss and Amazon rainforest loss, plus various social factors like global gross domestic product (GDP) and fossil fuel subsidies.
Greenhouse gas emissions are at an all-time high, while glacial ice thickness is at its lowest point in 71 years of record-keeping. The world is richer than it’s ever been, measured by global GDP, while the sky is more polluted than ever, measured by carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide concentrations in the atmosphere.
“The updated planetary vital signs we present reflect the consequences of unrelenting business as usual,” the authors wrote in the study. “A major lesson from COVID-19 is that even colossally decreased transportation and consumption are not nearly enough, and that instead transformational system changes are required, and they must rise above politics.”
While the report includes some positive trends, like record increases in the use of solar and wind energy and institutions divesting money from the fossil fuel industry, it paints a generally bleak picture of the future, accentuated by ongoing surges in climate-related disasters like floods, hurricanes, wildfires and heat waves. The planet may also be about to pass – or has already passed – critical natural tipping points, such as the Amazon rainforest becoming a carbon source rather than a carbon sink, from which it will be hard to recover.
This all boils down to one conclusion – the future habitability of our planet depends on immediate large-scale action. To accomplish this task, the team suggests a three-pronged near-term policy approach: implement a “significant” global carbon price to reduce emissions, phase out and eventually ban fossil fuels and restore and protect key carbonrich ecosystems, like forests and wetlands, to preserve the planet’s largest carbon sinks and protect biodiversity.
Did you know? China emits 27 per cent of world emissions