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Nearly 200 countries will meet Monday in a virtual meeting to finalize what promises be a horrifying scientific overview of climate impacts on accelerating speed. This will highlight the need to reduce emissions and prepare for the future.
Already, the world is feeling the effects of global heating, which is largely due to the burning of fossil fuels. Last year saw a series of deadly floods and heat waves across four continents.
The upcoming update from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is set to outline in stark detail what the best available science tells us are the impacts of the changing climate – past, present and future.
Scientists and diplomats will review, line by line, a Summary for Policymakers. This is a summary of underlying reports that can be thousands of pages in length.
Agence France-Presse (AFP), 2021 has seen an early draft to the IPCC review. It shows how severe climate impacts are a real possibility.
In some cases, this can mean that adapting and coping with extreme heat, flash flooding and storm surges is a matter of life or death.
Alexandre Magnan (a Paris-based researcher at the Institute for Sustainable Development and International Relations) said that even if we find solutions for reducing carbon emission, we will still need solutions for adapting. He did not comment on the report’s findings.
Species extinction, ecosystem collapse, crippling health impacts from disease and heat, water shortages – all will accelerate in the coming decades even if the carbon emissions that drive global warming are drawn down, the report is likely to find.
“This is a real moment of reckoning,” said Rachel Cleetus. She is the Climate and Energy Policy Director at the Union of Concerned Scientists.
She explained to AFP that “this is not just more scientific projections regarding the future.” “This is about extreme and slow-onset catastrophes that people are experiencing right now.”
Plan ahead
Three months after the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow, this report is now available. It outlines commitments to halt deforestation and curb methane emission, phase down coal-fired electricity, and increase financial aid to developing nations.
The IPCC assessments are divided into three sections. Each section has its own “working group” of hundreds scientists.
In August 2021, the first installment of physical science concluded that global warming is almost certain to surpass 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degree Fahrenheit) within a decade.
This is the Paris Agreement’s limit on heating, beyond which the effects become more severe.
This second report on impacts and adaptation, due for release after the two-week meeting, is likely to underscore that vulnerability to extreme weather events – even when they are made worse by global warming – can be reduced by better planning.
Friederike Otto from Imperial College noted that this is not just true in the developing countries. She pointed out that flooding in Germany last year caused billions of dollars and killed many.
“Even without global heating, there would have been a large rainfall event in densely populated areas where the rivers flood very easily,” Otto, who is a pioneer in the science that quantifies the extent to which climate changes make extreme weather events more likely.
Making hard choices
The latest report will likely also zero in on the ways that climate change is increasing inequality within and between nations.
This means that those who are least responsible for climate change are also the ones most affected by its effects.
Experts and advocates claim that this is not only unjust but also a barrier to solving the problem.
Clark University professor Edward Clark was the lead author of one of its chapters. He said, “I don’t think there are paths to sustainable development that don’t substantively address equity issues.”
Since the 19th Century, the Earth’s surface had warmed by 1.1 degrees Celsius.
The 2015 Paris agreement calls for global warming to be “well below” 2° Celsius, with ideally a more ambitious limit of 1.5° Celsius.
This report will help to further that goal.
“There are limits – for ecosystems and human systems – to adaptation,” said Cleetus. “We cannot adapt to runaway climate changes.”
Indeed, the report will likely highlight more than ever the dangers of “tipping points”, invisible temperature tripwires in the climate system that can cause irreversible and potentially devastating change.
Some of them – such as the melting of permafrost housing twice as much carbon as in the atmosphere – could fuel global warming all on their own.
At the same time, scientists are only just beginning to get a handle on so-called cascading and compound impacts – how Greenland’s melting ice sheet, for example, affects ocean currents across the globe.
Carr said that there are a finite amount of choices we have that will move us into the future productively. “Everyday we delay and wait, some of these choices get harder or disappear.”
