climate catastrophe
Scientists: “World clearly in climate emergency”
A dried up riverbed is exposed after the Yangtze River’s water level dropped. According to a team of researchers, our earth is already at red alert. Photo
© Uncredited/CHINATOPIX/AP/dpa
Flood disasters, forest fires, heat waves – the climate emergency is here. One research team is certain: it can’t go on like this. Otherwise it will be far worse.
According to a team of researchers, our earth is already at red alert. “Humanity is clearly already facing a climate emergency,” write the authors led by William Ripple and Christopher Wolf from Oregon State University shortly before the COP27 climate conference in Sharm el, Egypt Sheikh. In recent years, Ripple, supported by thousands of other researchers from all over the world, has repeatedly warned of such a “climate emergency” and called for countermeasures.
The team reports in the journal BioScience that 16 of the 35 analyzed parameters that are important for the climate are currently at a record level. These included, for example, the number of livestock on earth and the consumption of gas, oil and coal as well as the melting rate of glaciers and the Greenland ice sheet. The world population is bigger than ever before. Among the record-breaking factors are a few that counteract global warming, such as the use of solar and wind energy.
In another part of the report, the authors point out the consequences of the climate crisis, such as increasing heat waves, flood disasters and forest fires. “As we can see from the annual increases in climate disasters, we are in the midst of a major climate crisis and it will only get worse if we continue to do things the way we have been doing them,” Wolf said. The authors call for countermeasures – including better nature conservation and the elimination of virtually all emissions from fossil fuels.
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