“We’re all going to die.” But one of them might want to do so after reading the Intergovermental Panel on Climate Change Fifth Assessment Report (AR5).
The summary of the full report takes up a 40 page PDF document, issued Nov. 1st, 2014.
Data analysis is punctuated by highlighted text boxes. A few examples:
“Human influence on the climate system is clear, and recent anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases are the highest in history. Recent climate changes have had widespread impacts on human and natural systems.”
“Warming of the climate system is unequivocal, and since the 1950s, many of the observed changes are unprecedented over decades to millennia. The atmosphere and ocean have warmed, the amounts of snow and ice have diminished, and sea level has risen.”
“Each of the last three decades has been successively warmer at the Earth’s surface than any preceding decade since 1850. The period from 1983 to 2012 was likely the warmest 30-year period of the last 1400 years in the Northern Hemisphere.”
“Anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions have increased since the pre-industrial era, driven largely by economic and population growth, and are now higher than ever. This has led to atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide that are unprecedented in at least the last 800,000 years. Their effects, together with those of other anthropogenic drivers, have been detected throughout the climate system and are extremely likely to have been the dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid-20th century.”
“Limiting climate change would require substantial and sustained reductions in greenhouse gas emissions which, together with adaptation, can limit climate change risks.”
It goes on like this page after page, but it is this last statement that hurts the most. To avoid catastrophe for us and our fellow creatures the message is: we must stop the carbon addition immediately. Ban Ki-moon, General Secretary General of the United Nations, attending the unveiling of the report in Copenhagen, made the sobering statement that the carbon addition must end by the end of the century. But the report itself suggests that the Secretary’s timetable may not be fast enough. Leaving behind our current lifestyle in the next decade or so while denying that lifestyle to developing countries will be among the most momentous challenges ever faced by civilization.
I would like to provide a list of world leaders who are up to the challenge. But instead I am going to take the dogs on a hike, hoping that this problem will have resolved itself by the time I get back.
Another example of things going wrong. Look out krill, here come the Russians: Russia and China block creation of Antarctic Conservation area.
{New Mexico sunrise, looking west, November 2, 2014, dlw photo}