https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/08/09/united-nations-climate-report-dire/
Opinion: The U.N.’s dire climate report confirms: We’re out of time
Eugene Robinson
A man watches as wildfires approach Kochyli beach on the Greek island of Evia,
about 100 miles north of Athens on Aug. 6. (Thodoris Nikolaou/AP)
Almost 30 years ago, I covered the first “Earth Summit” of world leaders in Rio
de Janeiro, at which the U.N.-sponsored Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change issued its initial assessment of what our spewing of carbon dioxide and
other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere was doing to the planet.
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That 1992 document is modest about what researchers, at the time, could not be
sure of. They admitted there was a chance they might be seeing “natural climate
variability.” They thought “episodes of high temperatures” would become more
frequent, but they couldn’t be sure. The “unequivocal detection of the enhanced
greenhouse effect” was still in the future.
Submit a question for Eugene Robinson's Aug. 10 live chat
The IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report, released Monday, makes clear there is no
longer any reason to use such guarded language — and no longer any fig leaf of
scientific uncertainty to shield governments or individuals who would continue
to temporize.
“It is unequivocal that human influence has warmed the atmosphere, ocean and
land,” the report says in its summary for policymakers. “Widespread and rapid
changes in the atmosphere, ocean, cryosphere and biosphere have occurred…
Human-induced climate change is already affecting many weather and climate
extremes in every region across the globe.” There is now strong evidence of
“observed changes in extremes such as heat waves, heavy precipitation,
droughts, and tropical cyclones, and, in particular, their attribution to human
influence.”
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As if you didn’t already know that.
The second-biggest wildfire in California’s recorded history is now burning out
of control, having destroyed the Gold Rush town of Greenville, the latest in a
string of fires in the state. An apocalyptic fire season is plaguing not just
western North America but southern Europe as well, including blazes that are
devastating Greece’s second-largest island. Earlier this summer, an
unprecedented “heat dome” set astonishing new temperature records in the
Pacific Northwest and western Canada, including an all-time high for anywhere
in Canada: 121 degrees in Lytton, British Columbia, a town that was mostly
destroyed the following day by wildfire.
Last month, an almost biblical deluge caused flooding in Germany and Belgium
that swept away picturesque towns and killed more than 200 people. Coastal
megacities such as Lagos, Nigeria, are struggling to cope with frequent and
widespread flooding — caused by an average rise in sea levels, according to the
new IPCC report, of nearly 8 inches since the beginning of the 20th century.
Oceans are rising because glaciers and ice sheets are melting and because
warmer water occupies more volume than cooler water.
Read the transcript of Eugene Robinson's Aug. 3 live chat
All of this is the result of about 2 degrees Fahrenheit of global warming —
caused by human activity that has boosted the concentration of carbon dioxide
in the atmosphere by 47 percent and vastly increased the concentration of
methane, an even more powerful greenhouse gas. And we are stuck with the
consequences of our irresponsibility: “Global surface temperature will continue
to increase until at least the mid-century under all emissions scenarios
considered,” the IPCC says.
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So we have no choice but to adapt to the warmer world we have created and now
must live in. We don’t know what caused the shocking and deadly Surfside, Fla.,
condominium collapse, for example, but we would be foolish not to reexamine
oceanside building codes to account for rising seas. We would be foolish not to
revise our methods of forest management to cope with extreme heat, drought and
fire.
An even bigger challenge is finding ways for billions of people in the
developing world to attain middle-class living standards via sustainable energy
sources rather than the burning of fossil fuels. China is by far the world’s
biggest emitter of carbon dioxide; India’s emissions are rising fast. People in
the Philippines, Indonesia, Pakistan, Nigeria and Ethiopia want lives of
comfort and plenty, just like ours.
That is why massive investment in new technologies, such as solar power and
energy storage, has to be such an urgent priority. At the rate we’re going, the
world could warm by nearly 8 degrees Fahrenheit — by the end of this century,
according to the IPCC. Relatively few of us who are alive today would still be
around to witness what we have wrought. But we know we need to change our ways.
Our descendants will curse our memory if we fail to act.
