[WSMDiscuss] The IPCC Report 2021: The slow apocalypse!?

[Sukla Sen]

<<Eight years in the making, authored by the world’s leading climate
scientists and approved by 195 national governments, the report confirmed
the meaning of the evidence before our eyes: the cumulative impact of human
activity since the Industrial Revolution is “unequivocally” causing rapid
and potentially catastrophic changes to the climate. The future that
environmental scientists foresaw with alarm, when the IPCC produced its
first report three decades ago, has arrived.

Without an accelerated reduction in greenhouse gases during the next
decade, the ambition of the 2015 Paris climate agreement to limit global
heating to 1.5C will not be met. The price of failure will be a world
vulnerable to irreversible and exponential effects of global heating: there
will be worse floods more often, more terrible and frequent heatwaves and
devastating and repeated droughts.

The science is irrefutable. Less certain is the strength of political will
to act upon it. An awesome burden of responsibility now rests upon this
generation of leaders as humanity finds itself at a fork in the road. The
actions taken or foregone during the next 10 years will define the
parameters of the possible for future generations. A step-change is
required, but across the world green rhetoric continues to translate into
policymaking at a pace which is fatally slow. China has committed to the
target of net zero emissions by 2060, but continues to build coal-fired
power plants both at home and abroad. Along with top carbon-emitters such
as Russia and India, it refused to endorse the 1.5C goal at an April summit
convened by the American president, Joe Biden. As Mr Biden’s special envoy
for climate, John Kerry, has said, if countries such as these cannot be
persuaded to enact faster reductions over the next decade, the target looks
unachievable.>>

(Excerpted from: <
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/aug/09/the-guardian-view-on-the-ipcc-climate-report-the-fierce-urgency-of-now
>.)

For the Report: <https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/#FullReport>.

Sukla
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