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Climate experts: “Almost out of time”

“As the world battles historic droughts, landscape-altering wildfires and deadly floods, a landmark report from global scientists says the window is rapidly closing to cut our reliance on fossil fuels and avoid catastrophic changes that would transform life as we know it,” CNN reported on Monday, August 9, 2021 (story here).

In short, the planet is warming faster than expected, which can be arrested only by “making deep cuts to greenhouse gas emissions, while also removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere,” the scientists said. “Bottom line is that we have zero years left to avoid dangerous climate change, because it’s here,” one of the lead author told CNN.

Eights years of scientific work are distilled into the report, described as “the most comprehensive assessment yet” of the climate problem, which will be published on Monday, August 10, 2021, by a UN panel on climate change (details here), and it warns “we’re almost out of time.”

“The fires, floods and extreme weather seen around the world in recent months are just a foretaste of what can be expected if global heating takes hold,” the Guardian, a U.K.-based newspaper, summarized in a story here.

Previously, scientists have called the 2020s a “crucial” decade in the fight against climate change, during which CO2 must be cut in half to prevent disastrous global warming.

A London professor says some of the impacts predicted in previous reports “seem to be underestimated, but we can’t know if the devastation of summer 2021 is the new normal without a few more years’ data. But what we do know is if emissions continue to rise, then increasingly severe climate impacts will occur.”

He added, “What we need to keep in mind is that we all live in places that have built up over decades and centuries to cope well with a given climate. The really, really scary thing about the climate crisis is that every single achievement of every human society on Earth occurred under a climate that no longer exists.” He argues we need to be cutting emissions “much faster” than we are.

The evidence is there, the conclusions indisputable; climate change is real, it’s here now, it’s getting worse. The debate is — or should be — over.

But I don’t believe humanity is going to save itself. We won’t do nothing; we’ll do something, but not enough. It’s too much change, too fast, for most people; and political resistance will ensure that we don’t do enough, soon enough, to prevent what’s coming.

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