The Italian researcher who has worked in the US for years and is co-author of the twelfth chapter of the UN report on climate: “Even if global limits, such as the 1.5 ° ceiling, are difficult to achieve, any effort is better than nothing”
Sudden and very violent floods, devastating fires, heat waves. And, again, ice that melts in the Arctic, seas that rise and overwhelm the coasts, oceans that are increasingly acidic. IPCC scientists yesterday published the Sixth Report on Climate Change. Since 1990, the intergovernmental body of the United Nations has been measuring Earth fever, summarizing the best international research, and warning us of our race to catastrophe. For the first time, however, terms such as “inevitable” or “irreversible” appear. And the UN secretary general, Antonio Guterres, speaks of a “red code” for the Earth.
What happen? The fateful threshold of + 1.5 ° of warming of the earth’s surface, compared to pre-industrial levels, will be reached within the next two decades, probably much sooner. We are already at + 1.1 °, “inevitable” therefore to touch that wall unless we proceed with “immediate, rapid and large-scale reductions” of climate-altering emissions, of which there is no sign to date. Otherwise the worst can really happen: the IPCC foresees five scenarios, up to + 5 ° of fever. On the other hand, such rapid warming has not been recorded for at least 2000 years, temperatures so high for 6,500 years – and the Arctic with its ice is the one that has suffered the most – oceans so acidic for two million years. The more intense and frequent floods already affect 90% of the world’s regions. Like drought.
Red code: “the climate crisis is inevitable and irreversible”
The human origin of these disasters, now also evident in Europe, is “incontrovertible”. “Unfortunately, the current man-made level of warming will stay with us for a long time, unless technological solutions are found to absorb the greenhouse gases we have already emitted, thus eliminating or limiting the concentrations already present in the atmosphere – explains the Italian Claudia Tebaldi, a climatologist who has worked in the US for years and is co-author of the twelfth chapter of the report -. Some phenomena will continue to worsen even if we decrease emissions immediately, such as rising sea levels or melting glaciers, because they involve extremely slow processes – decades or hundreds of years – but many other phenomena would diminish, such as the likelihood of events. extreme and devastating: heat waves, floods, fires … ».
Very close to the climate summit, or COP26, in Glasgow. Already postponed for a year due to a pandemic, in November it will bring together – barring further emergencies – the heads of state and government from all over the world. If the European Union and the United States have already presented their climate plans, many other countries are missing the appeal. And the the positions of China and India, among the main polluters in the world today, remain ambiguous. “We scientists are not politically unbalanced, we cannot do it. Obviously, the hope is that having presented such a clear and solid reality of the situation, those who make the decisions in Glasgow will have a fairly clear overview of the various scenarios in front of them – continues Tebaldi -. I always say that even if global limits, such as the 1.5 ° ceiling, are difficult to achieve, any effort is better than nothing ».
One thing is clear. The era of fossil fuels, for science, must end. «Greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and methane act like a blanket on the Earth, raising temperatures and leading to a large number of changes in the climate system – explains to Courier service Alexander Ruane, co-author of the report and scientist at NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies -. Aerosols associated with air pollution also affect climate, some act to reflect sunlight (cooling the planet), others lead to increased warming. Overall, the continuous combustion of fossil fuels will increase warming and the reduction of these emissions will, on the contrary, help stabilize the planet’s climate ».
August 10, 2021 (change August 10, 2021 | 22:18)
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