An ever more desperate sounding climate change lobby is urging “unprecedented changes in all aspects of society” to avoid climate Armageddon in a report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
The IPCC calls for massive investments in renewable energy to meet climate-change goals, claiming that avoiding a catastrophe will involve “annual average investment needs in the energy system of around $2.4 trillion” between 2016 and 2035.
The report says avoid a catastrophe will involve “annual average investment needs in the energy system of around $2.4 trillion” between 2016 and 2035.
“Scientists might want to write in capital letters, ‘ACT NOW IDIOTS,’ but they need to say that with facts and numbers, and they have,” said Greenpeace climate activist Kaisa Kosonen, who was an observer at recent IPCC meetings.
According to the report, “rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society” are needed to keep global temperatures from rising more than 1.5 degrees.
The unprecedented changes called for by the group include transitions in land, energy, industry, buildings, transport, and cities. “Global net human-caused emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) would need to fall by about 45 percent from 2010 levels by 2030, reaching ‘net zero’ around 2050,” the report states.
We only have a dozen years for global warming to be kept to a maximum of 1.5C, beyond which the rise of even half a degree will significantly worsen the risks of extreme weather phenomena such as drought, floods, and extreme heat, as well as poverty for hundreds of millions of people, the report warns.
The report, which was unveiled in South Korea early Monday morning, was instigated by an invitation from the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) when it adopted the Paris Agreement in 2015, IPCC said in a press release.
“The next few years are probably the most important in our history,” warned Debra Roberts, Co-Chair of IPCC Working Group II.
“This report gives policymakers and practitioners the information they need to make decisions that tackle climate change while considering local context and people’s needs,” she said.
Last March, Scientific American invited its readers to “chill out” over global warming, insisting that doomsday scenarios attributed to climate change are simply false and the human race will be able to accommodate gradual changes in global temperatures.
The essay, penned by John Horgan, the director of the Center for Science Writings at the Stevens Institute of Technology, cited “ecomodernists” who reject climate panic and frame the question of climate change and humanity’s ability to cope with it in radically new terms.
Follow Thomas D. Williams on Twitter Follow @tdwilliamsrome