The IPCC Report 2021: The slow apocalypse!?

[Sukla Sen]

<<Eight years in the making, authored by the world’s leading climate scientists and approved by 195 national governments, the report confirmed the meaning of the evidence before our eyes: the cumulative impact of human activity since the Industrial Revolution is “unequivocally” causing rapid and potentially catastrophic changes to the climate. The future that environmental scientists foresaw with alarm, when the IPCC produced its first report three decades ago, has arrived.

Without an accelerated reduction in greenhouse gases during the next decade, the ambition of the 2015 Paris climate agreement to limit global heating to 1.5C will not be met. The price of failure will be a world vulnerable to irreversible and exponential effects of global heating: there will be worse floods more often, more terrible and frequent heatwaves and devastating and repeated droughts.

The science is irrefutable. Less certain is the strength of political will to act upon it. An awesome burden of responsibility now rests upon this generation of leaders as humanity finds itself at a fork in the road. The actions taken or foregone during the next 10 years will define the parameters of the possible for future generations. A step-change is required, but across the world green rhetoric continues to translate into policymaking at a pace which is fatally slow. China has committed to the target of net zero emissions by 2060, but continues to build coal-fired power plants both at home and abroad. Along with top carbon-emitters such as Russia and India, it refused to endorse the 1.5C goal at an April summit convened by the American president, Joe Biden. As Mr Biden’s special envoy for climate, John Kerry, has said, if countries such as these cannot be persuaded to enact faster reductions over the next decade, the target looks unachievable.>>

(Excerpted from: <https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/aug/09/the-guardian-view-on-the-ipcc-climate-report-the-fierce-urgency-of-now>.)

For the Report: <https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/#FullReport>.

Sukla