Time and again, environmental concern has touched upon us, but it often failed to spark the masses to stop and reflect. The United Nations’ IPCC has come up with its 6th Assessment Report on climate change and, the facts, figures, and possibilities it has put forth in front of us have baffled us more than ever. This blog intends to outline the crucial points of the assessment report and give a hint of the imminent dangers and catastrophic future we’re heading towards.
What is IPCC, and why is it important?
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, is a body under the United Nations that came into being to analyze, express and integrate the scientific information concerning the global climate policies and their impact on all the fields of the world. Their reports are written and scrutinized in various steps, thus guaranteeing objectivity and transparency.
Scientists and policymakers treat these reports as the backbone of our understanding of climate change. The IPCC does not do its original research from scratch. They’re written by experts in the relevant subjects, including people like physicists, atmospheric and oceanic scientists, energy specialists, economists, etc . Through the years, IPCC has contributed immensely to the vital debate of human influence on climate change. It tries to center its work on factual information instead of making opinionated judgments.
The Current State of the Climate
The IPCC confirms what we already know and can see in the world around us. From wildfires, because of extreme heat, moisture loss to devastating floods, because of extreme rain events, the future quite simply is here, and it should worry us enormously. Discussing in terms of numbers, the world could be hit with a rise of 1.5o Celsius rise as early as 2040, which means that the speed of rising emissions and the consequent temperature increase has accelerated many folds over these last few decades.
This report is different because, for the first time, scientists at IPCC have come together and are no longer coy about telling us that climate change is caused by human-related activities that are clear. However, they are going a step further to attribute climate change to specific extreme weather events. Hence, we know with greater certainty today of the role of climate change and say the extreme heat event in Canada or the wildfires in Greece which are happening today or the floods in Germany this is new and important.
The report breaks down today’s climate change in much more detail than just globally average temperature rises. Whether that’s in rainfall pattern changes, ocean heat waves, sea level rises, weather pattern changes, the report emphasizes the plethora of ways our climate is already changing, Thanks to our actions! Many of the climate changes we’re causing now are irreversible. Meanwhile, fast-melting arctic ice creates sea levels that aren’t just rising but surging at a rapidly accelerating pace. According to the report, the annual rate of sea-level rise increased by 46 mm/year from the first 70 years of the 20th century to the period between 1971 - 2006, but in the last 15 years alone, that rate has almost doubled.
Possible Climate Futures
Discussing the future, the report puts forth five illustrative scenarios or possibilities we can presume heading towards us.
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The most optimistic (with real possibility tending to zero) scenario expects the
world to shift towards sustainability to such an extent that we cut down the
global CO2 emissions to net-zero by the end of 2050. Even if we ideally bring
this scenario to reality, we’d still be around the 1.5oC above preindustrial era,
but positively not for anything worse.
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The second scenario doesn’t promise the CO2 emissions going to net-zero
anything around 2050, but cutting them enough, through socio-economic
sustainability, to stabilize the warming number at 1.8oC by 2100.
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The mid-way scenario presumes the world going at the same pace regarding
socio-economic factors and environmental deterioration. The expected rise in
the temperature in such a case would be 2.7oC by the end of the century.
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The fourth scenario speculates that the world is getting more intense in
competition, national security, and individual food supplies. The CO2
emissions are expected to go roughly double the present number leading to a
3.6oC average temperature rise.
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The worst-case scenario, the future that fears, theorizes the world’s global
economy growing at the highest possible pace, but at the cost of depriving
away the fossil fuels recklessly. In this case, the average global temperature
gets to a blazing 4.4oC higher.
(In the graph, SSP1-1.9, SSP1-2.6, SSP2-4.5, SSP3-7.0, and SSP5-8.5 denote the first, second, third, fourth, and fifth scenarios, respectively)
The increase in average global temperature is not the only stat we need to focus on. However, it gives an idea of the severity, being proportionate to the several extremums concerning the global water cycle, global monsoon precipitation, soil moisture, and acuteness of wet and dry events.
Limiting Future Climate Change
The report puts the reduction of anthropogenic CO2 emissions at the center stage while dealing with the possibilities of limiting environmental degradation in the coming times. The thing is that even this most aggressive emissions-cutting scenario has it likely that the global temperatures rise by more than 1.5o C. In other words, even if we incredibly aggressively cut emissions, there’s a good chance that this limit set by the Paris Climate Agreement as its more ambitious target will be breached. This is not good news. Limiting global warming to 1.5o C is profoundly important for the most vulnerable people and fragile ecosystems on the planet.
However, the report makes it clear time and time again that every bit of warming matters. Every bit of emissions matters; the truth is that the world won’t end if we heat it by more than 1.5 degrees, but some people’s worlds will end even if we heat it by less than 1.5 degrees.
Carbon pricing looks at the problem with a pretty clear vision. If releasing carbon dioxide is free, people don’t have any reason not to do it. But it’s not free. It’s going to cost plenty of money to deal with the consequences of that carbon emission.
Conclusion
Climate change news is like a constant background sound of the alarm. You know that something’s wrong, but perhaps you get used to the noise. But then reading the IPCC report is like someone suddenly opening the window, and all that noise hits you at once.
If you’ve heard the alarm the IPCC has sounded, and activists have been ringing for decades, we encourage you to get involved. It is hard to hear and read about these objective disaster scenarios, but we’ve got a set of facts, piles of data, and the knowledge to deal with this mess.
- Team Prakriti, IIT Kanpur
(The graphs presented in the blog are taken from the IPCC’s Summary for Policymakers IPCC_AR6_WGI_SPM)