Just in case you thought that UN’s 95 percent certainty that climate change is happening is a gimmick, the same United Nations body assessing our fate and its connection to greenhouse gas emissions released last week another shocker that’s no big surprise: last year 2012, saw the greatest amount of emissions to our planet yet.
Green Prophet received the update from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
According to latest estimates, atmospheric volumes of greenhouse gases blamed for what is climate change hit a new record in 2012. The report was developed by the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO), the body which records greenhouse gas emissions.
“For all these major greenhouse gases the concentrations are reaching once again record levels,” WMO Secretary-General Michel Jarraud (above) told a news conference in Geneva at which he presented the UN climate agency’s annual Greenhouse Gas Bulletin.
“This year is worse than last year, 2011. 2011 was worse than 2010,” says Jarraud.
This accelerating trend will make it hard for us to keep climate change within 2 degrees Celsius, which is a target agreed at a Copenhagen summit in 2009.
After that we can expect random, crazy and catastrophic weather events.
“Every passing year makes the situation somewhat more difficult to handle, it makes it more challenging to stay under this symbolic 2 degree global average.
“The actions we take now or don’t take now will have consequences for a very, very long period.
“The more we wait for action, the more difficult it will be to stay under this limit and the more the impact will be for many countries, and therefore the more difficult it will be to adapt.
“Even if we were able to stop today — we know it’s not possible — the ocean would continue to warm and to expand and the sea level would continue to rise for hundreds of years,” Jarraud told reporters.
Greenhouse gas emissions in 2012 reached 393.1 parts per million (ppm), about 41 per cent above the pre-industrial level. He says that these are the highest levels seen in the last 800,000 years.
Author: Karin Kloosterman
Karin Kloosterman is an award-winning journalist and publisher that founded Green Prophet to unite a prosperous Middle East. She shows through her work that positive, inspiring dialogue creates action that impacts people, business and planet. She has published in thought-leading newspapers and magazines globally, owns an IoT tech chip patent, and is part of teams that build world-changing products to make agriculture and our planet more sustainable. Reach out directly to [email protected]
Almost everyone’s addiction to the growing power of money to trap them in debt
blinds them to their growing mass of pollution, ecocide and extinction of life on Earth,
which whatever exec or politician may lie to connive, dismiss or contrive,
and whatever any parent or teacher says or arranges, children soon learn
that money controls everything, so nothing changes. Yet would they rather
life on Earth die than abandon their delusions of growing super wealth as the
toxins spread and growing billions suffer permanent loss of health?
With their power to avoid the question they dream of other living planets
to conquer and devour.