‘Wild climate ride only just beginning’
YOKOHAMA, Japan – Global warming is driving humanity toward a whole new level of many risks, a UN scientific panel reports, warning that the wild climate ride has only just begun.
Twenty-first century disasters such as killer heat waves in Europe, wildfires in the United States, droughts in Australia, and deadly flooding in Mozambique, Thailand and Pakistan highlight how vulnerable humanity is to extreme weather, says a new report released early Monday by a Nobel Prize-winning group of scientists.
“We’re all sitting ducks,” said Princeton University Professor Michael Oppenheimer, one of the main authors of the 32-volume report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
More than 100 governments unanimously approved the scientist-written 49-page summary, which is aimed at world political leaders.
“Changes are occurring rapidly, and they are sort of building up that risk,” said the overall lead author of the report, Chris Field of the Carnegie Institution for Science in Stanford.
Climate change will worsen problems that society already has, such as poverty, sickness, violence and refugees, according to the report. And, on the other end, it will act as a brake slowing down the benefits of a modernising society, such as regular economic growth and more efficient crop production.
The report, the fifth on warming’s impacts, includes risks to the ecosystems, including a thawing Arctic, but it is far more oriented to what it means to people than past versions.
“I can’t think of a better word for what it means to society than the word ‘risk’,” said Virginia Burkett of the US Geological Survey.
Part of the report talks about what can be done: reducing carbon pollution and adapting to and preparing for changing climates with smarter development.
Meanwhile, top official at the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies Maarten van Aalst has said that freaky storms like 2013’s Typhoon Haiyan, 2012’s Superstorm Sandy and 2008’s ultra-deadly Cyclone Nargis may not have been caused by warming, but their fatal storm surges were augmented by climate change’s ever-rising seas.
