BY OUR REPORTER
Drastic changes in weather conditions all across the world has bought climate change to everybody’s lips. In all countries, there’s water scarcity, rivers are drying up; flash floods, excessive heat and other abnormal conditions are common stories everywhere.
Now, climate change is no longer the exclusive problems of the industrialized world. According to experts, we should prepare for the worst. In a write-up published by a portal, titled: A Code for Humanity, experts weigh different options open to rescue our planet:
A CODE FOR HUMANITY
“Every COP over the last decade has been described as the ‘one that’s going to change the world’. Unfortunately, we’ve heard a lot of talk about targets, but not a huge amount of action. I’m hoping for the best but won’t be surprised if we don’t make that much progress,” admits Paula Owen, CEO and founder of the sustainability agency Green Gumption.
Despite the general pessimism, progress and action are critical, with the latest IPCC report being described as a “code red” for humanity by UN Secretary-General António Guterres. “It’s a good description of the situation, but it would have been better said a decade ago,” opines global climatological expert Jim NR Dale.
“To a certain degree, we’ve all been a little ignorant, naïve and even greedy, but now some fossil fuel companies and others are trying to turn the ship around—the Titanic has hit the iceberg and we are sinking, they now realise that. However, it’s difficult when the world is dependent upon oil and gas,” states Dale.
Professor Katharine Hayhoe, Chief Scientist for The Nature Conservancy, agrees, saying it is clear we’re all in the same boat: “We’re facing a challenge that will affect every one of us within our lifetimes, not to mention future generations and most other life on earth. The need to act collectively and decisively has never been more urgent.”
Although a lot of the damage is irreparable and irreversible, at least in terms of human time, all is not lost. Reducing the flow of heat-trapping Greenhouse Gas (GHG) into the atmosphere, by either reducing the sources of emission or increasing the sinks that accumulate and store these gases, such as oceans and forests, could still make the planet habitable in the future.
Prepare for unprecedented weather events
Mitigation efforts will require an unprecedented, sustained, global effort involving all aspects of human activity. At present, global surface temperature, which is fundamental to characterising and understanding global climate change, will continue to increase until at least the middle of the century under all the GHG emission scenarios that have been considered.
This temperature rise has accelerated the speed at which the polar icecaps are melting, causing them to melt six times faster than the rate of just 20 years ago. The massive icesheets, present in the world’s seas and on every continent except Australia, have also started to melt at an alarming rate. All this melting ice is leading to rising sea levels that will eventually flood coastal and low-lying land.
Agricultural and ecological droughts in some regions, especially the already arid or semi-arid regions with large population concentrations, will threaten the food security, livelihoods and social cohesion of hundreds of millions of people.
The IPCC Assessment Report states that climate change will cause extreme and unprecedented events when they occur, at a larger magnitude, greater frequency and in places where it hasn’t happened before, as well as in previously unseen combinations.
Discussion about this post