By Sarah Kaplan, The Washington Post, August 9, 2021
The latest United Nations climate report is not exactly light beach reading. The sweeping assessment released Monday by more than 200 scientists with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change paints a picture of a planet in dire straits.
The concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere is at its highest in the history of the human species, the researchers say. Global average temperatures are more than 1 degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) above preindustrial levels and rising at rates not seen since before the fall of Rome. The ocean is more acidic,Arctic ice is disintegrating, natural disasters are worsening, and ecosystems are careening toward collapse. That human activities — primarily the burning of fossil fuels — have caused this upheaval is an “unequivocal” fact.
But the report also contains crucial reasons for hope. It does not find evidence for a single temperature threshold beyond which climate change will spiral out of control. It suggests that the feedback loops that come with high levels of warming — such as melting permafrost that releases more carbon into the atmosphere — are dwarfed by the current human emissions. The scale of increasing temperatures and escalating extremes is directly related to the amount of greenhouse gases people choose to unleash.
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