Just when the weather was cooling down in the Middle East a little, we get woke up again with the usual alarm and this time from a United Nations panel: humankind is to blame for global warming, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warns in a new report just out. Rising temperatures could have devastating effects on our people and planet as the risk carries with it new heat waves, floods, and drought. If you weren’t convinced before the 95 percent certainty of the UN group was issued, now is your time to wake up and take action.
The group came to its conclusions behind closed doors, as the 195 UN member states summed up their report – a mammoth 1,000 plus page document. Prospects for our planet in peril are even more dire than what was predicted by the group back in 2007.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, also known as IPCC, says it is 95 percent certain that mankind caused more than half the warming observed over the past 60 years.
Our human existence and material needs produce amounts of carbon dioxide (CO2) which goes on to heat up the atmosphere.
What’s the deal? Well if you haven’t heard already, sea levels are expected to rise, but now at a faster pace. See this little art project to imagine what will happen. We have a report on what’s expected for North Africa. And based on what we have read, cities like Alexandria are most certainly at immediate risk. By 2100 the sea levels are expected to rise between 26 and 82 centimeters – that’s almost a whole meter!
“We know much more about the reasons for rising sea levels now than we did a couple years ago,” said climate researcher Stefan Ramstorf of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. “Measurements show that both large continental ice sheets in Greenland and the Antarctic are increasingly losing ice masses.”
It is the group’s fifth assessment report on climate change.
Meanwhile global warming will continue.
They write in the report: “Each of the last three decades has been successively warmer at the Earth’s surface than any preceding decade since 1850. In the Northern Hemisphere, 1983–2012 was likely the warmest 30-year period of the last 1400 years.”
“To steer humanity out of the high danger zone, governments must step up immediate climate action and craft an agreement in 2015 that helps to scale up” efforts to curb greenhouse gas emissions, executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, Christiana Figueres, said.
We’ve already being seeing freaky weather patterns around the world as our planet revolts against the effects of increased CO2.
“The atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide (CO2), methane, and nitrous oxide have increased to levels unprecedented in at least the last 800,000 years. CO2 concentrations have increased by 40% since pre-industrial times, primarily from fossil fuel emissions and secondarily from net land use change emissions. The ocean has absorbed about 30% of the emitted anthropogenic carbon dioxide, causing ocean acidification,” the report elucidates.
Over all we can expect that humid regions will get more rain while dry regions, like in the Middle East, will get even less water. Shit. Not a great forecast for us.
If you are keen on reading the summary report to push it into the faces of your local governments, find it online here (links to PDF). The IPCC is located here. The almost two hour meeting can be seen in a recorded webcast format here.
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]
No doubt the planet is showing signs of extreme warming and emissions are part of the problem–but not all of it. The warnings about the cause (the people) of global warming by scientists have been out there for the last 2 generations. However, big energy will not allow real change to lower emissions. Do you see any evidence of such? No. All proposed fuel changes by huge companies have used more resources to create them than they save or help in emission release, making the situation worse–corn. The very people who sit on these councils, especially the UN, are the ones who have the most to lose if real change occurs. An example of what we’ve been told over the last 5 years: the sun will be very active throwing off bursts of heat; they miscalculated the coronal activity by 25 times for the 11 years calculation–oops! The sun is now in the most inactive period we’ve ever seen, exactly the opposite of what we were being told by scientists over the last 5 years. How can any of them be believed? Based on the misinformation and disinformation so far rather than rising seas I’d expect an ice age, so bundle up.
To survive —
1. Safely recycle all human-generated waste materials.
2. Protect and expand all wilderness areas, like the Amazon rainforest.
3. Peacefully reduce the human population with family planning programs that give all women the legally protected right to decide if and when to conceive and birth her children.
4. Denounce and oppose all forms of male supremacy.
I think more people are starting to believe, wake up, and pay attention, but so far I don’t have a clear answer yet on what the average Joe can do. Such action steps are required to motivate the mainstream. To talk about climate change in big terms — in future terms — even if it’s only our in terms of our children and grandchildren — it’s not enough to make the average person care. Sorry to say, but it’s true. In order to see more grassroots/local community action, we need more organizations to make the message tangible and accessible. I haven’t seen that happen yet/