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PHOTOGRAPH BY SAUL LOEB/POOL/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
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By Laura Parker, Senior Reporter, ENVIRONMENT
The “code red alert” for the planet, issued Monday by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, is an unsurprising, if unsettling message. It means there’s no going back—the warming of the planet will intensify and keep pushing key climate systems toward irreversible change. The latest report, the sixth the IPCC has published since 1990, firms up the connection between global warming and extreme weather.
“We can link extreme weather to climate change in the same way we can link smoking to cancer,” one of report’s authors tells Sarah Gibbens, who details the flooding and the wildfires that have swept the globe in the past few months. The worst may be yet to come as fire and hurricane season reach their traditional peaks in the next few weeks.
In a companion story, Alejandra Borunda describes the possible consequences if tipping points emerge in the Amazon rainforest, the Earth’s biggest ice reserves in Greenland and Antarctica, or the current in the Atlantic Ocean. “In order to stabilize climate, we have to stop emitting immediately, full stop,” climate scientist Charles Koven, one of the report authors, told Borunda.
Yet, there is reason for optimism. The scientists, who analyzed 14,000 scientific reports, say it’s not too late to stave off the worst effects. This moment presents opportunity: The news is so bad that it may galvanize the world’s nations to reconsider the global climate plan. (Pictured above, a receding glacier in Greenland in May.)
Already, the world has seen more movement on climate in the last year than since 2015, when the Paris climate accord was adopted. Renewable energy use is growing rapidly. In June, leaders in Europe pledged to shift away from fossil fuels by 2030. Last week, President Biden, with the support of major automakers, announced a plan that half of all new vehicles sold in the United States will be electric. Even China, which announced last September it will strengthen pledges to cut greenhouse gas emissions and reach carbon neutrality, has been shaken by flooding that has displaced 13 million people. The disaster was caused by a slow-moving rainstorm—exactly the kind of weather that scientists say will occur even more frequently.
The climate scientists caution to not lose sight of the mission. Better to focus less on hand-wringing, they say, and more on getting to work.
“We need to act like we are in a climate emergency,” says Tim Lenton. “People have now woken up and said, ‘Damn, the scientists weren’t bluffing,’ but now 30 years later here we are. It’s the action that counts now.”
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