March 28, 2024

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Billions of people are in danger from climate change, U.N. report warns

PHOTO: DW

TOP AFRICA NEWS Reporter

Billions of people on every continent are suffering because of climate change, according to a major new United Nations report released on Monday.

The report by nearly 300 top scientists from around the world paints a picture of a planet already transformed by greenhouse gas emissions, teetering on the brink of widespread, irreversible damage.

“People are now suffering and dying from climate change,” says Kristie Ebi, one of the lead authors of the report and an epidemiologist at the University of Washington.

That’s because heat waves, droughts, floods, wildfires, disease outbreaks and other dire effects of climate change are accelerating more rapidly than scientists expected in many parts of the world, including in North America. And as oceans, rainforests and polar regions heat up, nature is less and less able to help us with the task of adapting to a hotter Earth, the report finds.

Still, the authors of the report make clear, humans are not powerless. Repairing damaged ecosystems and reducing greenhouse gas emissions dramatically and immediately would spare billions of people from illness, poverty, displacement and death.

There is still time to control global warming

Scientists warn that humans must limit the rise in global average temperature to less than 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit (1.5 degrees Celsius) in order to avoid the most catastrophic effects of climate change. Global temperatures have already risen about 2 degrees Fahrenheit, or about 1.1 degree Celsius.

A previous U.N. report released last summer estimated there is at least a 50% chance that global temperatures will reach that 2.7 degree Fahrenheit threshold by mid-century. The new report digs into what that might look like. For example, there is a big difference between lingering briefly in the danger zone, and permanently camping out there.

If temperatures in some parts of the world exceed 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit briefly, before dropping again by mid-century, it’s still possible to avoid widespread irreversible changes. Damaged ecosystems could recover. Strained aquifers could be replenished.

But, the report notes, if humans allow global warming to linger above 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit for decades, the world will be transformed for centuries. Ice sheets and glaciers will not soon refreeze. Extinct species will not come back to life.

Preventing that kind of runaway warming requires dramatic cuts to greenhouse emissions in the next decade, which would require that humans stop burning fossil fuels in cars, trucks and power plants. The U.S. has been slow to reduce emissions in part because misinformation about climate change and the politicization of climate science has caused widespread public confusion about the true risks of global warming, the report says.

In reaction to the report, U.N. Secretary-General, António Guterres doubled down on that message, calling fossil fuels “a dead end.”

“Coal and other fossil fuels are choking humanity,” Guterres says. Fossil fuel companies, banks and investors are all complicit, he argues. “Those in the private sector still financing coal must be held to account. Oil and gas giants – and their underwriters – are also on notice.”

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