Before COP26, science provided new evidence indicating the urgency of the climate crisis

The international community’s return to the Climate Negotiations CouncilIn Glasgow from SundayWith yet another barrage of scientific evidence knocking on the door to warn of the effects, catastrophic and in many cases already irreversible, Climate change will happen on this planet.

It will be in the Scottish city of Glasgow, where the 26th United Nations Conference on Climate Change (COP26) meets Resuming negotiations stalled last year due to the pandemic and almost two years after the last conference held in Madrid in December 2019.

Two years they were piling up the new Scientific Reports Which warns of the consequences of climate change, which should largely guide negotiations in the Scottish city, a date many consider the most important since 2015 Paris Agreement Because it must serve Develop some of the expected points in that agreement that were stuck in Madrid.

Just one week before the opening of COP26 it was World Meteorological Organization (WMO) who knocked on your door, He warned that the concentration in the atmosphere of carbon dioxide – the main culprit for climate change – hit a new record last year and that the numbers rose despite the pandemic and the global slowdown in the economy.

Among the reports from the past two years, the reports published by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, better known by its English acronym, stand out.IPCC– and that has advised the United Nations for more than 30 years with assessment reports, They are based solely on scientific evidence on climate change, its impacts, risks, adaptation and mitigation options.

This warns the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which was released last August Climate change is “undoubtedly” caused by human activity and has led the world to its warmest period in 2000 years, but also that many of its consequences will be irreversible, as glaciers and the poles, for example, will continue to melt for decades or centuries, even if emissions are reduced.

Scientists stressed in the report that the current changes in climate are unprecedented in recent centuries and even millennia, and I calculated that if the current rate of greenhouse gas emissions was maintained, the global temperature would rise by 2.7 degrees by the end of the century. Compared to the pre-industrial average (1850-1900), an increase would lead to more extreme weather events (droughts, floods or heat waves).

This report identifies five possible scenarios, the most pessimistic of which indicates that greenhouse gas emissions could double by mid-century., and then the effects will be disastrous Since the temperature will rise 4 degrees, far from the targets set in Paris to limit the increase to 2 degrees set by the Paris Agreement, 1.5 is preferred.

The IPCC data was backed up just four weeks later by a new report, in this case from World Meteorological Organization, with the latest data on global climate, a study confirmed that the planet is following the path of accelerated warming and that The temperature increase is already on its way to 3 degrees.

This report indicated that it is very likely that in the next five years, temperatures will exceed the threshold 1.5°C With regard to those recorded in the pre-industrial era, Because the concentrations of the gases responsible for global warming in the atmosphere continue to break records.

Or that the average temperatures between 2017 And 2021 is the highest recorded in a five-year period (more than one degree above the average recorded 150 years ago), and that what has happened in the climate over the past century is a clear anomaly If compared to the estimates of the last 100 thousand years, with the consequent impact on human health.

Among the studies published in recent months, the study by the American organization central climate, which brings together many scientists from around the world researching climate change and its impacts on populations to assist policy makers in decision-making, and They approved a text that they published in the prestigious journal Nature.

His conclusions were too sharp, on condition tripled (up to 300 million) The number of people around the world who will be regularly exposed to rising sea levels and Coastal flooding that will occur due to climate change.

The computation model they used allowed, unlike the systems that had been used before, It marked treetops and rooftops, making the beaches seem less vulnerable than they really are.

Scientists also designed a file interactive map Which provides an accurate prediction of how sea-level rise and flooding will affect thousands of places around the world under different scenarios: from persistent emissions with virtually no restrictions to extreme carbon reductions.

The research provided individual data from a total of 135 countries and noted that roughly six Asian countries (China, Bangladesh, India, Vietnam, Indonesia, and Thailand) live there. 237 million people will suffer from these floods at least once a year if adequate coastal defenses are not built.

Scientific Reports for the past two years has joined the report just published by an international team of researchers in the journal scalpelWhere they warned that many plans They are designed to revitalize the economy after the serious crisis caused by the pandemic, involving trillions of dollars in injections, do not match climate targets.

Scientists have estimated that less than one in five dollars invested in the economic recovery after the coronavirus outbreak will be used to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and that the overall impact will be very negative on public health. And his conclusion: “We are recovering from a health crisis in a way that puts our health at risk.”

And the culmination of all scientific reports arrived precisely a few days before COP26 itself with the publication of the conclusions of work in which the results of nearly 90,000 previous studies (between 2012 and 2020) which shows the overall consensus found among researchers: 99.9% of scientific articles conclude that climate change is caused by humans.

(With information from EFE)

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