IPCC's Latest Report Describes "A Brief And Rapidly Closing Window Of Opportunity"

[hatrack]

The breakneck speed of global warming exceeds the pace of efforts to protect billions of vulnerable people, according to a new report released Monday by the world’s top climate scientists. The report warns of a growing mismatch between rising temperatures and slow, fragmented efforts to adapt, leaving little time for catching up before “a brief and rapidly closing window of opportunity” is sealed shut.

“With fact upon fact, this report reveals how people and the planet are getting clobbered by climate change,” said UN Secretary-General António Guterres, calling the 3,500-page document “an atlas of human suffering” and an indictment of a “criminal” “abdication of leadership.” To underscore the challenges to global cooperation, Russia’s military invasion of Ukraine will likely overshadow the first major report in nearly eight years on climate vulnerability.

This is the second doorstop document released in less than six months from the United Nations-backed Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), with two additional reports expected before the end of the year. Researchers in the latest volume focused on the unpreparedness of nations to cope with climate instability and compounding stressors from higher temperatures, now at 1.1° Celsius above pre-industrial levels.

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A group of more than 270 scientists and 675 contributors from around the world examined every major natural and human domain, including freshwater, coasts, cities, agriculture, health, and poverty. Their consensus findings assert that severe consequences of climate change are already visible across the board in unprecedented heat waves, rising sea levels, and record-breaking wildfires. They also show that strategic adaptation can save lives. A substantial change since the last version of this report, released in 2014, is that many projections about how climate change will unfold have been subsumed by observations about how it already has. “We are so used to talking of climate change in the future tense,” said Aditi Mukherji, principal researcher at the International Water Management Institute and co-chief author of the IPCC’s chapter on water. “All of us need to stop talking of climate change in a future tense. You have to say climate change has happened.”

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https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2022-02-28/ipcc-report-un-scientists-warn-of-closing-window-to-ready-for-hotter-world

[SamKnause]

1. The window has already closed.

To pretend otherwise is insanity.

Too many feed back loops have be triggered.