Humanity must rescue oceans to rescue itself, UN warns

Two days after the climate summit failed to provide a game change pledge to reduce carbon emissions, the United Nations Wednesday warned that global warming is threatening many humans by destroying the ocean and the frozen spaces of the planet.

Ice sheets, rising sea levels, melting glaciers, marine dead seas, toxic algae, etc.-rafts that affect the sea and ice reduce the amount of fish, destroy renewable freshwater sources, and destroy several large cities each year. Cause a storm. A groundbreaking assessment approved by the 195 Intergovernmental Panel (IPCC) on climate change.

Some of these effects are irreversible.

Valerie Masson-Delmotte, a researcher at the Institute for Climate and Environmental Sciences and co-chairman of the IPCC, said, “If global warming is limited, major ocean changes will continue.”

"But it will at least buy us the time needed for future impact and adaptation."

Summarizing 7,000 peer-reviewed studies, the report records greenhouse gas emissions, mostly burning fossil fuels, reminding us that our species is leading the planet into an unbearable greenhouse environment.

But the red light of the need to face changes that are no longer inevitable is raised more clearly than ever before.

For some island countries and coastal cities, this almost certainly means finding a new place to call home.

Ocean heating at terrible cost

The basic 900-page scientific report is the fourth round of the UN's fourth report within a year, while others focus on 1.5- degrees Celsius temperature limits for global warming, biodiversity reduction, land use, and the global food system. .

All four concluded that humanity should examine how humans produce, distribute and consume almost everything in order to avoid the worst devastation of global warming and environmental degradation.

According to the report, by absorbing a quarter of artificial carbon dioxide and absorbing more than 90{7be40b84a6a43fc4fae13304fce9a2695859798abfc41afd127b9f8b21c5f9c5} of the heat generated by greenhouse gases, the ocean has kept the planet alive and well.

The ocean grew acidic, potentially weakening its ability to absorb carbon dioxide. Warm surface water has expanded the power and range of deadly tropical storms. Marine heat waves are cleaning coral reefs that are unlikely to survive a century.

Sea-level rises are accelerating as the melting speeds of glaciers, especially on Earth's ice sheets above Greenland and Antarctica, accelerate.

& # 39; the world of the higher seas & # 39;

Since 2005, the sea has risen 2.5 times faster than the 20th century. If carbon emissions continue to decline, the rate of rise in water lines will quadruple again in 2100, the report said.

Bruce Glavovic, co-author of Massey University in New Zealand, said, "Regardless of the emission scenario, we face a world with higher sea levels."

"This doesn't rise much at sea level to cause fatal problems," he added. "Rising sea levels are not a slow-starting problem, but a crisis of extreme weather events."

By 2050, many coastal metropolitan cities and small island countries will experience climate disasters once a century each year, when greenhouse gas emissions are drastically reduced.

And by the middle of the century, more than one billion people will live in low-lying areas vulnerable to low pressure, massive flooding and other extreme weather events caused by rising sea levels.

Heavy price tag

Some cities, such as New York, will spend tens of billions of dollars, perhaps even more to strengthen their defenses.

According to a summary of the 42-page summary of policymakers in the IPCC report, in fact, building embankments and embankments along with other measures will reduce the risk of flooding due to sea level rise and storm surges over the next 80 years.

But a huge price tag: up to billions of dollars a year.

However, for many large cities and large delta cities in developing countries, engineering solutions are either unrealistic or incredibly expensive.

Carbon draft removal

Under the consensus rules of the IPCC, all countries must sign in the language of the report summary, which is designed to provide the reader with objective science-based information.

The five-day meeting in Monaco went deep into overtime when Saudi Arabia objected to what was a routine reference to the October 2018 IPCC report on the possibility of stopping global warming at 1.5 degrees Celsius.

The 2015 Paris Agreement calls for a "well below" global warming of 2C and 1.5C if possible.

As a result, the passage of the final draft was removed, including the presumption that humanity's "carbon budget" (the amount of CO2 that can be released without violating the temperature barrier) in a 1.5-second world could be as short as eight years. A copy seen by AFP.

The temperature of the earth has risen 1 degree C above the pre-industrial level.

Source: AFP