Drastic Action Needed to Mitigate Global Warming Dangers: Report
October 8, 2018 Drastic, immediate change is needed in order to forestall the dangers of climate change, according to a global scientific authority. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued a report at its annual session, which this year was in Incheon, South Korea. In that report, the product of 91 authors from 30 countries, the scientists sounded a clear alarm because they found that Earth is already two-thirds of the way along a perilous path of global warming and that if serious action isn't taken by 2030, then the effects could irreversible. Global temperatures have already warmed about 1 degree Celsius. The clearly spelled out goal of the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement was to limit such a rise in temperature to 1.5 degrees Celsius by 2050. Unchecked, at the current rate, global temperatures will reach that level by 2040, the scientists said. Among the extreme results if widespread are changes are made, the report said:
Fueling the rise are such culprits as emissions of carbon dioxide. Industries such as construction, energy, and transportation would need to make widespread changes just to hold off another similar rise. Taking such drastic action would result in further warming, the IPCC report said, but that warming would be of a smaller amount and could result in minimal cooling in time. The report singled out the burning of coal as a particularly potent emitter of carbon emissions and suggested that nations large and small reduce their overall coal reliance–currently at 40 percent of all sources of electricity–to between 1 percent and 7 percent and replace coal with renewable energy, such as wind power and solar power. The report puts a high price tag on making such switches but also asserts that such costs would be less than the drop in revenues and increase in costs needed to address emergencies that would accompany a temperature rise of the kind already underway. As basis for the report, the authors used more than 6,000 peer-reviewed articles and studies. |
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