While the world’s top coalition of climate scientists say the planet is warming faster than ever with dire effects due to human causes, they also emphasize that rapid, aggressive actions to cut emissions of heat-trapping pollutants could stabilize temperatures in a matter of decades.
On Monday, the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released its Sixth Assessment Report on the causes, effects and impacts of global warming.
Some of the key messages:
- Human-caused emissions of carbon dioxide, methane and other gases have warmed the planet 1.1 degrees Celsius since the late 19th century, and temperatures could potentially rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius over the next 10-20 years.
- The Earth is the warmest that it has been in more than 125,000 years. Carbon dioxide levels in 2019 were their highest levels in 2 million years.
- Scientists are more confident than ever in linking changes including rising sea levels, melting glaciers, extreme temperature events, extreme storm and rain events, droughts and fires to climate change.
- If we can cut our CO2 emissions to the point that we’re taking more carbon out of the atmosphere than we release into it, we could gradually reverse the warming. But rising seas are another matter — it could take “several centuries to millennia for global mean sea level to reverse course.”
The report was created by 234 authors from 66 countries, including Kyle Armour, an associate professor and climate scientist at the University of Washington, Richard Feely of the NOAA Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory, and Alan Mix of Oregon State University.
Armour told The Seattle Times that climate change was affecting every region on Earth.
“Climate change is really widespread and intensifying and many of the changes are unprecedented in thousands of years,” Armour said.
The number that sticks with me is the potential of reaching a 1.5 degree Celsius increase in a period as short as a decade. With a slightly more than 1 degree increase over the past century plus, my home region of the Pacific Northwest has already been rocked by drought, nightmarish wildfires and a surreal heat dome this past June that set previously unthinkable temperature records for an area known for its soggy, mossy sheen.
What happens if we go up by nearly half-again-as-much in such a short time?
The IPCC report puts a sharper focus on the importance of setting and meeting ambitious near-term carbon reduction goals. The world’s governments will meet this fall in Glasgow for the U.N. Climate Change Conference of the Parties (COP26) to set reduction targets for their nations.
In the Northwest, technology giants have been setting their own climate agendas.
- Microsoft remains a leader with its goal of becoming carbon negative by 2030. In January, the company announced that it has reduced its carbon emissions by 6%, dropping from 11.6 million metric tons to 10.9 million metric tons. It also paid for the removal of an additional 1.3 million metric tons of carbon from the atmosphere.
- Amazon is aiming for carbon neutrality by 2040. Last year the company disclosed that its emissions actually increased from 2018 to 2019 by 15%. Amazon was responsible for 51.2 million metric tons of carbon dioxide, a volume roughly on par with Singapore’s footprint. The company continues investing in renewable energy projects and is the largest corporate buyer of renewable energy in the U.S. and Europe.
- Amazon and Microsoft have both backed some key climate legislation for Washington state, and in May Gov. Jay Inslee signed into law what many hailed as the nation’s most ambitious package of climate policies.
Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates weighed in on the issue with a series of tweets on Monday afternoon. Gates, who in February released a book on the climate crisis, wrote: “Every climate action we take must be toward the goal of reaching zero. That means rapidly deploying the technologies we have today to reduce emissions and investing immediately in the solutions we still need to get the world to zero.”
