Tackling climate change — a now ubiquitous term for global warming caused by humans emitting carbon dioxide and methane from coal, oil and natural gas into the atmosphere — is becoming exponentially more urgent, with the language of scientists, officials, and activists growing increasingly urgent. With every passing year.
The latest report from the world’s highest body of climate scientists provides a damning assessment of where the world is headed if more is not done to curb global warming. Already, more extreme weather events are occurring all over the world, ranging from longer, more intense and frequent droughts and heat waves to devastating floods and wetter cyclones, which are at least partly attributed to climate change.
How the planet got here, the current and future effects of climate change, and what to do next are all questions experts have been searching for decades.
___
Editor’s note: This story is part of an ongoing series that answers some basic questions about climate change, the science behind it, the effects of a warming planet and how the world is dealing with it.
___
There may be a slight uptick in climate-related policies, discussions, and activities, but the science isn’t all that new.
Scientists in the early 19th century began to realize that some gases and water vapor could trap heat in the atmosphere. And over the past 60 years, researchers have been able to conclusively measure rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, thanks to the carbon dioxide monitoring station on Mauna Loa in Hawaii.
Meteorologists in the mid-20th century also began to understand climate as a “dynamic, ever-changing system, possibly also susceptible to external influences and changes,” said Martin Mahoney, lecturer in human geography at East University. Anglia who studies the history of climate science and its interactions with politics.
Add to that the knowledge that carbon dioxide levels are rising and scientists are beginning to realize that this could be a major problem.
“In the 1960s, I started doing conferences and workshops on the ‘carbon dioxide problem’…meteorologists along with geophysicists and other people gathered to think about the implications of this in very abstract theoretical terms,” Mahoney said.
But it wasn’t long before this theoretical conundrum became a serious concern.
By the late 1980s, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was established to assess how warm the climate is and whether humans have anything to do with it.
Since its first report in 1990, the link between fossil fuels and global warming has been clear. Coal, oil, and natural gas for electricity, heating and transportation, industries like steel and cement, and gases from agriculture and refrigerants, are burning the planet.
Scientists say average global temperatures have risen by about 1.1°C (2°F) since the mid-1800s, causing extreme temperatures, rising seas and weather disasters, with experts warning of more catastrophic weather events in the world. The Road. As the world warms up more.
It won’t just be heat waves, droughts, wildfires and hurricanes. “It’s going to be water resources, it’s going to be food supply … the national security concerns will be much more pronounced than they are now,” said Kim Cobb, a climate scientist at Brown University.
Those who live in less developed countries or in poor communities are often the most vulnerable to climate change. Many have called on rich, highly polluting countries, such as the United States and most of Europe, to pay their share so that developing countries are more resilient to harsh weather conditions and can reduce the use of fossil fuels. Known as “loss and damage” in climate negotiations, it is an area on which nations have struggled to agree in recent years.
In a somewhat rare moment of agreement between rich nations and the most climate-vulnerable and least emitting nations, countries agreed at the annual United Nations climate conference in Paris in 2015 to limit warming to “well below” 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit) since It then pre-industrial age, with the goal of putting an end to the rise in average global temperature to 1.5°C (2.7°F).
Experts say alternatives to fossil fuels, such as solar and wind, need to be scaled up significantly if Paris climate goals are to be met. Newer technologies, such as carbon capture or green hydrogen, which are currently very expensive, and have not been extensively tested or both, must also be deployed to reduce global warming. Changes in people’s personal lives can also make a difference, although the big cuts come from government policies and choices made by giant corporations, not individuals.
Although some of the effects of global warming are limited, many scientists believe that limiting warming to a few tenths of a degree can be achieved, but only if drastic action is taken very quickly.
___
The Associated Press’s climate and environmental coverage receives support from several private foundations. Learn more about the AP’s Climate Initiative here. AP is solely responsible for all content.
Copyright 2022 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed without permission.
Originally published at San Jose News Bulletin
No comments:
Post a Comment