I wonder: As the earth's temperature continues to rise, will the orange color of Donald Trump's skin become more intense? He won't notice, though. He'll be too busy getting coal miners back to work.
Major climate report describes strong risk of crisis as early as 2040
The New York Times, Oct 7 2018
A landmark report from the United Nations' scientific panel on climate change paints a far more dire picture of the immediate consequences of climate change than previously thought and says that avoiding the damage requires transforming the world economy at a speed and scale that has "no documented historic precedent."
The report, issued by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a group of scientists convened by the United Nations to guide world leaders, describes a world of worsening food shortages and wildfires and a mass die-off of coral reefs as soon as 2040 — a period well within the lifetime of much of the global population.
The report "is quite a shock and quite concerning," said Bill Hare, an author of previous IPCC reports and a physicist with Climate Analytics, a nonprofit organization. "We were not aware of this just a few years ago." The report was the first to be commissioned by world leaders under the Paris agreement, the 2015 pact by nations to fight global warming.
The authors found that if greenhouse gas emissions continue at the current rate, the atmosphere will warm up by as much as 2.7° Fahrenheit (1.5° Celsius) above preindustrial levels by 2040, inundating coastlines and intensifying droughts and poverty. Previous work had focused on estimating the damage if average temperatures were to rise by a larger number, 3.6° Fahrenheit (2° Celsius), because that was the threshold scientists previously considered for the most severe effects of climate change. The new report, however, shows that many of those effects will come much sooner, at the 2.7° mark.
Avoiding the most serious damage requires transforming the world economy within just a few years, said the authors, who estimate that the damage would come at a cost of $54 trillion. But while they conclude that it is technically possible to achieve the rapid changes required to avoid 2.7° of warming, they concede that it may be politically unlikely.
President Trump, who has mocked the science of human-caused climate change, has vowed to increase the burning of coal and said he intends to withdraw from the Paris agreement. And today in Brazil, the world’s seventh-largest emitter of greenhouse gas, voters appeared on track to elect a new president, Jair Bolsonaro, who has said he also plans to withdraw from the accord.
The report was written and edited by 91 scientists from 40 countries who analyzed more than 6,000 scientific studies. The Paris agreement set out to prevent warming of more than 3.6° above preindustrial levels — long considered a threshold for the most severe social and economic damage from climate change. But the heads of small island nations, fearful of rising sea levels, had also asked scientists to examine the effects of 2.7° of warming.
Absent aggressive action, many effects once expected only several decades in the future will arrive by 2040. The report concludes that the world is already more than halfway to the 2.7° mark. Human activities have caused warming of about 1.8° since about the 1850s, the beginning of large-scale industrial coal burning.
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