It is possible to avoid the risk of dangerous runaway climate change without seriously denting global economic growth, scientists claim in the most comprehensive report on global warming ever published.
Greenhouse gas emissions driving higher temperatures, most of which come from burning fossil fuels, need to be cut to nearly zero by the end of this century, says the study by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the world’s leading authority on global warming.
Otherwise there is a risk that more frequent and intense extreme weather, along with other impacts of a changing climate, will add costs that “cannot even be quantified”, said panel chairman, Dr Rajendra Pachauri, at the launch of the study in Copenhagen on Sunday.
The measures needed to limit warming to less than 2 degrees Celsius from pre-industrial times, a threshold scientists say it is risky to breach, need only cause an annual 0.06 percentage point cut in global consumption, a proxy of economic growth, the study says.
Global temperatures have already risen by nearly 1 degree since the industrial revolution.
There are many ways to cut emissions, such as ramping up renewable forms of energy such as wind farms and solar panels, or introducing higher taxes on carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas from fossil fuel combustion.
And it is likely that the coal and oil industries will suffer “reduced revenues”, the report says.
But governments have little time to waste, according to panel.
“Delaying additional mitigation to 2030 will substantially increase the technological, economic, social and institutional challenges associated with limiting the warming over the 21st century to below 2ºC relative to pre-industrial levels,” the IPCC said on Sunday.
Delaying additional mitigation to 2030 will substantially increase the technological, economic, social and institutional challenges associated with limiting the warming over the 21st century to below 2ºC relative to pre-industrial levels
- IPCC
The tone of the study is more urgent than previous reports by the 26-year-old IPCC, which has issued five weighty assessments of the latest state of knowledge about climate change for governments since 1990.
It started publishing its latest assessment 13 months ago and the report it finalised in Copenhagen is aimed at clarifying its findings about the causes of climate change, as well as possible solutions.
The report will play an important role in international climate talks in Paris at the end of next year that are due to produce a new global treaty on reducing emissions.
The study by more than 830 scientists from 80 countries repeats earlier findings that humans have been the dominant cause of the warmer temperatures measured since the 1950s.
“Human influence on the climate system is clear, and recent anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases are the highest in history,” it says.
“Each of the last three decades has been successively warmer at the Earth’s surface than any preceding decade since 1850. The period from 1983 to 2012 was likely the warmest 30-year period of the last 1,400 years in the northern hemisphere.”
The impact of warming on rising sea levels and melting ice caps is already evident, the report warns, and is likely to intensify unless action is taken.
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