Although we are making progress in transitioning away from sources of greenhouse gases, it is not happening nearly fast enough. The article below is just another reality check and we need only read the news to see that Climate Change is here and impacting all of us in some way. The scope of the problem is huge in that everything we currently do needs to be changed to come into balance with the World if and when we eventually get there. No time like the present but putting in place strategies to get through to that point can not be emphasized enough. SZ
Humanity has missed its chance of keeping global warming below 1.5C and it will take “heroic efforts” to stay below 2C this century, the scientist leading the global effort to understand climate change has warned.
Jim Skea, chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), said a failure to sufficiently curb carbon emissions had left the world on track to warm by 3C by 2100. This average masks variations between land and sea, with western Europe and the UK facing even greater warming – perhaps as much as 5C by the end of the century.
“We are potentially headed towards 3C of global warming by 2100, if we carry on with the policies we have at the moment,” said Skea.
“Obviously temperature rises over land will be higher than over the ocean. We don’t know how warm it will get [over land] but I know it may be more than the global average.”
The Met Office has tried to project the UK impacts. By 2070, it says, winters will be up to 4.5C warmer but 30pc wetter, meaning more flooding. Summer will be up to 6C warmer, with frequent droughts and surging numbers of heat-related deaths.
Skea said: “It’s very clear climate change is no longer decades in the future. It’s very obvious it’s happening now, so we need to adapt.”
Consequences of 3C warming
What kind of world might we face under 3C or more of warming?
“One of the biggest risks in many regions will come from the combination of heat and humidity.
“It will just be difficult to live and to work outside. In some parts of the world, that will be really a showstopper for some kinds of economic activity.”
Europe faces some of the biggest challenges. Other scientists have predicted Scotland becoming a centre for wineries, that Poland will struggle to grow staple crops such as potatoes and Italy might no longer be able to cultivate durum wheat – used to make pasta.
Skea warned of deserts appearing in southern Europe. He said: “The whole of Europe is vulnerable and especially the Mediterranean. We are already seeing desertification taking place, not only in North Africa, but some of the southern margins of Europe, like Greece, Portugal and Turkey.”
Skea’s words carry weight. Described by some as “the most important scientist no one’s ever heard of”, he oversees the Geneva-based UN organisation whose research is the scientific bedrock on which all climate-related policy is built.
His warning about humanity’s failure to stop the world getting warmer comes just weeks before Ed Miliband, the Energy Secretary, will lead a UK delegation to Azerbaijan, this year’s host of the United Nation’s annual COP climate negotiations.
These UN meetings are widely seen as the world’s best hope of preventing runaway climate change. The Paris Agreement, struck at the 2015 meeting, was effectively a pledge by the 195 signatory countries to slash emissions and keep the global temperature rise below 2C – when compared to pre-industrial levels – and ideally below 1.5C.
Few signatories have kept their promises and instead emissions have continued to rise, equating to about 60bn tonnes of CO2 a year.
Skea was speaking at a summit organised by the Zemo Partnership, which promotes low-carbon transport and which he helped found 21 years ago, while a relatively lowly academic at Sussex University. That was at the start of a career that saw him become Professor of Sustainable Energy at Imperial College, a director of The UK Energy Research Centre and then a founding member of the Government’s powerful Climate Change Committee.
His role as chairman of the IPCC is his most influential. Its work underpins global policies that matter to all of us, as taxpayers and bill payers as well as, perhaps, concerned citizens.
Last week, Sir Keir Starmer headed to Liverpool to announce plans to invest £22bn of taxpayers money into a carbon capture programme as part of efforts to limit the level of harmful emissions into the atmosphere.
Last month, Mr Miliband pledged billions more to build a new national grid and surround the UK in offshore wind farms – to be paid for out of our energy bills.
And later this month, Rachel Reeves is expected to announce taxes that will likely wipe out a large chunk of the UK’s oil and gas industry, justified because those fossil fuels are the prime cause of global warming.
Skea had nothing to do with those individual policies but the inspiration for all of them can be traced directly back to the dire warnings set out in the scientific reports overseen by the IPCC.
What those reports say is that humanity has heated up the planet by 1.1C already and there’s a lot more to come. Or as the report puts it: “Human activities, principally through emissions of greenhouse gases, have unequivocally caused global warming, with global surface temperature, reaching 1.1C above 1850-1900 [levels].”
It adds: “Continued greenhouse gas emissions will lead to increasing global warming … a best estimate of warming for 2100 spans a range from 1.4C for very-low greenhouse gas emissions to 4.4C for a very-high emissions scenario.”
Higher temperatures wouldn’t just mean warmer weather. That heat’s energy will fuel more extreme weather, increase sea levels and make farming tougher and less productive, the IPCC has concluded.
What are the chances of keeping to the minimal warming scenario? Not great, said Skea, pointing to a key graph in the IPCC’s latest report.
It shows how humanity is pouring the equivalent of 60bn tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere every year – up from 40bn tonnes just two decades ago.
Keeping below the 1.5C margin would have meant cutting emissions for the last five years already. It would mean a 25bn-tonne reduction by 2030 and over 40bn tonnes by 2040. That, he admitted, was a massive and unfeasible reduction.
What can be done?
What about the future? Under the Paris Agreement every signatory nation was meant to ratchet up its future emission reductions – but the pledges sent so far add up to almost no reduction at all. It means the world could be emitting nearly 60bn tonnes of CO2 a year for years to come.
“Those reductions should have started from 2019,” said Skea. He added in a masterpiece of scientific understatement: “It means 1.5C is slipping away from us.”
Even hopes of limiting warming to 2C by 2100 look remote.
“You know, even that’s a big ask. We needed just over 20pc reductions in emissions by 2030 for a 2C pathway. And we’re no more than about five years away from that date.”
There was no emissions reduction in sight, he said.
Data from organisations such as the International Energy Agency tell a similar story. Demand for coal, the dirtiest of fossil fuels, hit a record 8.7bn tonnes last year and is still rising.
Natural gas consumption is predicted to hit a high of 4,200bn cubic metres this year, up by 100bn cubic metres compared to 2023. And global oil consumption is also at a peak – rising from 100m barrels a day two years ago to 103m barrels now.
Such figures are why Skea glumly said we were on track for up to 3C.
The IPCC was set up by the UN in 1988 and for the first decade or two of its life its warnings were regarded as highly controversial – challenged by politicians, the fossil fuel industry and a few scientists.
However, the sheer scale of its work and the thousands of scientists who have gathered real-world evidence supporting the IPCC’s findings mean such challenges are now rare.
Skea believed the current debate was far less about climate and the need to get to net zero and far more about the route needed to get there.
He said: “One hundred and ninety five governments signed up to the statement in the last cycle that human beings are unequivocally the cause of the climate change we’re seeing. And when you get to that level of consensus on such a strong statement, I think we have made a lot of progress.
“When the IPCC started out, the existential question was, are human beings causing climate change. But that’s now been accepted, and the question is, what do you do about it?”
The answer to that, he suggested, lay with politicians rather than scientists. There may be time to prevent the kind of warming that could make life unbearable for billions of people – but that future lies in the hands of our leaders.
“Frankly, it’s down to human agency and choice. It’s our politicians, our political system, that can choose or can choose not to implement the measures that we need.”