Governments Consider Important UN Climate Science Report – Crypto News Aktuell in German

PARIS — Diplomats from nearly 200 nations and leading climate scientists began a week-long gathering in Switzerland on Monday to condense nearly a decade of published science into a roughly 20-page warning about the existential threat of global warming and what to do about it .

The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s synthesis report – due to be released on March 20 – will detail observed and projected changes in the Earth’s climate system; past and future impacts such as devastating heat waves, floods and rising seas; and ways to stop the carbon pollution that is driving the Earth into an uninhabitable state.

“It’s a tremendous moment, seven years since the Paris Agreement and nine years since the last IPCC assessment report,” Kaisa Kosonen, senior policy advisor at Greenpeace Nordic, an official observer at IPCC meetings, told AFP.

Since its inception in 1988, the IPCC — an intergovernmental body with hundreds of scientists working for it on a voluntary basis — has published six three-part assessments, the most recent in 2021-2022.

“It’s scientists who tell governments how they’re doing in these crucial years,” Kosonen said.

The testimony is not good. Global greenhouse gas emissions have continued to rise even as scientists have warned that deadly consequences are occurring sooner and with less warming than previously thought.

Since the late 19th century, the Earth’s average surface temperature has increased by more than 1.1 degrees Celsius increased, enough to amplify a crescendo of weather disasters on every continent.

– CO2 budgets –

According to the IPCC, this warming is mainly caused by the burning of oil, gas and coal. In a video message on Monday, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres urged world leaders gathering for the COP28 climate summit in December to “accelerate the phase-out of fossil fuels”.

As part of the 2015 Paris Agreement, nations pledged to collectively limit the increase in the planet’s average temperature to “well below” 2°C and, if possible, to 1.5°C.

A 2018 IPCC special report made alarmingly clear that the more ambitious ambitious target – since adopted as a hard target by governments and companies – is the better choice for a climate-proof world.

But what was already a narrow path has become a tightrope act. According to the IPCC, humanity’s “carbon budget” to stay below 1.5 degrees is less than 300 billion tons of CO2, almost seven times the current annual emissions.

Two other special reports – one on the world’s oceans and frozen zones, the other on forests and land use – are also covered in the summary for policymakers being examined in Interlaken.

“The synthesis report is important because it will be the last IPCC product for a number of years and one of the key sources of knowledge to be considered in the first global inventory under the Paris Agreement,” Oliver Geden, one of the report’s lead authors and senior Fellow at the German Institute for International Security Affairs, told AFP.

The global inventory, to be presented ahead of COP28 in Dubai, will confront nations with the deep inadequacy of their Paris pledges to cut emissions, which would allow global temperatures to rise 2.8°C above the pre-industrial benchmark.

Among the IPCC’s findings that could be highlighted in the synthesis report is the looming threat of deadly heat.

– “More politicized” –

Even in a world at 1.8°C — an optimistic scenario, some scientists say — by 2100, half of humanity could face periods of life-threatening climate conditions created by the coupled effects of extreme heat and humidity.

There are similarly bleak forecasts for health, the global food system and economic productivity.

“What’s at stake matters to everyone on the planet — our ability to have healthy, nutritious and affordable food now and in the future,” said Rachel Bezner Kerr, a professor at Cornell University and the IPCC’s lead author for most New report on climate impact.

Last year’s floods that hit large parts of Pakistan and the ongoing drought in East Africa both bear the fingerprint of climate change.

The synthesis report will also reflect the debate on the best way to decarbonize the global economy, with some emphasizing the need to phase out fossil fuels quickly and reduce consumer demand, and others the potential of technological solutions.

Diplomats in Interlaken, checking the text line by line, can’t change the science in the underlying 10,750 pages of reports, but they can decide what to include or omit and can use wording to emphasize – or obscure – things.

“Over time, IPCC meetings have become more politicized, with government officials – mainly, but not exclusively, from oil-producing countries – interfering in the scientists’ discussions,” Nature magazine said in a recent editorial.

Despite this, “the main IPCC studies have exceptional reach, informing on everything from global climate deals … to the Fridays of Future school climate strike movement,” says the journal.