By Brad Plumer and Raymond Zhong NEW YORK TIMES
The dangers of climate change are mounting so rapidly that they could soon overwhelm the ability of both nature and humanity to adapt unless greenhouse gas emissions are quickly reduced, according to a major new scientific report released Monday.
The report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a body of experts convened by the United Nations, is the most detailed look yet at the threats posed by global warming. It concludes that nations are not doing nearly enough to protect cities, farms and coastlines from the hazards that climate change has unleashed so far, such as record droughts and rising seas, let alone from the even greater disasters in store as the planet continues to warm.
Written by 270 researchers from 67 countries, the report is “an atlas of human suffering and a damning indictment of failed climate leadership,” U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres said. “With fact upon fact, this report reveals how people and the planet are getting clobbered by climate change.”
The perils are already visible across the globe, the report said. In 2019, storms, floods and other extreme weather displaced more than 13 million people across Asia and Africa. Rising heat and drought are killing crops and trees, putting millions worldwide at increased risk of hunger and malnutrition, while mosquitoes carrying diseases such as malaria and dengue are spreading into new areas. Roughly half the world’s population currently faces severe water scarcity at least part of the year.
Few nations are escaping unscathed. Blistering heat waves made worse by global warming have killed hundreds of people in the United States and Canada, ferocious floods have devastated Germany and China, and wildfires have raged out of control in Australia and Siberia.
“One of the most striking conclusions in our report is that we’re seeing adverse impacts that are much more widespread and much more negative than expected,” said Camille Parmesan, an ecologist at the University of Texas at Austin and one of the researchers who prepared the report.
To date, many nations have been able to partly limit the damage by spending billions of dollars each year on adaptation measures such as flood barriers, air conditioning or early warning systems for tropical cyclones.
But those efforts are too often “incremental,” the report said. Preparing for future threats, such as dwindling freshwater supplies or irreversible ecosystem damage, will require “transformational” changes that involve rethinking how people build homes, grow food, produce energy and protect nature.
Global temperatures have already increased by an average of 2 degrees Fahrenheit since the 19th century, as humans have pumped heat-trapping gases into the atmosphere by burning coal, oil and gas for energy and have cut down forests.
Many leaders, including President Joe Biden, have vowed to limit total global warming to no more than 2.7 degrees, compared with pre-industrial levels. That is the threshold beyond which scientists say the likelihood of catastrophic climate effects increases significantly.
But achieving that goal would require nations to all but eliminate their fossil fuel emissions by 2050, and most are far off track. The world is currently on pace to warm between 3.6 and 5.4 degrees this century, experts have estimated.
“Unchecked carbon pollution is forcing the world’s most vulnerable on a frog march to destruction — now,” Guterres said. “This abdication of leadership is criminal.”