Too long, with charts, to post even salient points.
Please check link
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"We keep doing it because we have to do it, so [the
powerful] cannot say that they didn’t know. We know
what we’re talking about. They can say they don’t care,
but they can’t say they didn’t know.”
In Mérida on the Yucatán peninsula, where Cerezo-Mota
lives, the heat is ramping up. “Last summer, we had
around 47C maximum. The worst part is that, even at
night, it’s 38C, which is higher than your body
temperature. It doesn’t give a minute of the day for
your body to try to recover.”
She says record-breaking heatwaves led to many deaths
in Mexico. “It’s very frustrating because many of these
things could have been avoided. And it’s just silly to
think: ‘Well, I don’t care if Mexico gets destroyed.’
We have seen these extreme events happening everywhere.
There is not a safe place for anyone.
“I think 3C is being hopeful and conservative. 1.5C is
already bad, but I don’t think there is any way we are
going to stick to that. There is not any clear sign
from any government that we are actually going to stay
under 1.5C.”
Cerezo-Mota is far from alone in her fear. An exclusive
Guardian survey of hundreds of the world’s leading
climate experts has found that:
77% of respondents believe global temperatures will
reach at least 2.5C above pre-industrial levels, a
devastating degree of heating;
almost half – 42% – think it will be more than 3C;
only 6% think the 1.5C limit will be achieved.
The task climate researchers have dedicated themselves
to is to paint a picture of the possible worlds ahead.
From experts in the atmosphere and oceans, energy and
agriculture, economics and politics, the mood of almost
all those the Guardian heard from was grim. And the
future many painted was harrowing: famines, mass
migration, conflict. “I find it infuriating,
distressing, overwhelming,” said one expert, who chose
not to be named. “I’m relieved that I do not have
children, knowing what the future holds,” said another.
The scientists’ responses to the survey provide
informed opinions on critical questions for the future
of humanity. How hot will the world get, and what will
that look like? Why is the world failing to act with
anything remotely like the urgency needed? Is it, in
fact, game over, or must we fight on? They also provide
a rare glimpse into what it is like to live with this
knowledge every day.
The climate crisis is already causing profound damage
as the average global temperature has reached about
1.2C above the pre-industrial average over the last
four years. But the scale of future impacts will depend
on what happens – or not – in politics, finance,
technology and global society, and how the Earth’s
climate and ecosystems respond.
...The climate emergency is already here. Even just 1C
of heating has supercharged the planet’s extreme
weather, delivering searing heatwaves from the US to
Europe to China that would have been otherwise
impossible. Millions of people have very likely died
early as a result already. At just 2C, the brutal
heatwave that struck the Pacific north-west of America
in 2021 will be 100-200 times more likely.
But a world that is hotter by 2.5C, 3C, or worse, as
most of the experts anticipate, takes us into truly
uncharted territory. It is hard to fully map this new
world. Our intricately connected global society means
the impact of climate shocks in one place can cascade
around the world, through food price spikes, broken
supply chains, and migration.
One relatively simple study examined the impact of a
2.7C rise, the average of the answers in the Guardian
survey. It found 2 billion people pushed outside
humanity’s “climate niche”, ie the benign conditions in
which the whole of human civilisation arose over the
last 10,000 years.
The latest IPCC assessment devotes hundreds of pages to
climate impacts, with irreversible losses to the Amazon
rainforest, quadrupled flood damages and billions more
people exposed to dengue fever. With 3C of global
heating, cities including Shanghai, Rio de Janeiro,
Miami and The Hague end up below sea level.
“It is the biggest threat humanity has faced, with the
potential to wreck our social fabric and way of life.
It has the potential to kill millions, if not billions,
through starvation, war over resources, displacement,”
said James Renwick, at Victoria University of
Wellington, New Zealand. “None of us will be unaffected
by the devastation.”
“I am scared mightily – I don’t see how we are able to
get out of this mess,” said Tim Benton, an expert on
food security and food systems at the Chatham House
thinktank. He said the cost of protecting people and
recovering from climate disasters will be huge, with
yet more discord and delay over who pays the bills.
Numerous experts were worried over food production:
“We’ve barely started to see the impacts,” said one.
Another grave concern was climate tipping points, where
a tiny temperature increase tips crucial parts of the
climate system into collapse, such as the Greenland ice
sheet, the Amazon rainforest and key Atlantic currents.
“Most people do not realise how big these risks are,”
said Wolfgang Cramer, at the Mediterranean Institute of
Biodiversity and Ecology.
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