ISLAMABAD/PARIS: The United Nations (UN) is poised to release a capstone report on Monday, distilling nearly a decade of published reports on the impacts and trajectory of world warming and tools available to prevent climate catastrophe.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) 30-odd page “summary for policymakers,” comprising 10,500 pages authored by 1,000 scientists, is as dense as a black hole and would deliver a stark warning.
UN chief’s stance on the climate crisis
“We’re nearing a point of no return,” United Nations chief Antonio Guterres said last week as diplomats from 195 countries gathered in Interlaken, Switzerland, to finalise the final wording, finalised on Sunday night by exhausted and sleep-deprived delegates two days behind schedule.
“For decades, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) put forward evidence on how people and the planet are being rocked by climate destruction.”
Since the last Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s synthesis report in 2014, science has determined devastating impacts are happening quickly and at lower levels of warming than the lastly understood.
With Earth’s average surface temperature 1.2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels so far, the earth has seen a steady crescendo of extreme weather, and also including tropical storms made worse by increased seas.
On current trends, the globe is on track to warm by an additional 1.6 degrees.
In the year 2022, climate change quantifiably amplified deadly heatwaves in South Asia and South America, huge flooding in Pakistan and Nigeria, and record-breaking drought in Western Europe and the United States, according to the World Weather Attribution consortium, which includes several IPCC authors.
Science in the last decade has elevated the hazard posed by so-called tipping points in Earth’s weather system that could, beyond certain temperature thresholds, see tropical forests in the Amazon morph into savannah and ice sheets in West Antarctica and Greenland shed enough water to lift oceans by meters.
