“The math is brutally clear: while the world can’t be healed within the next few years, it may be fatally wounded by negligence [before] 2020.” Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research
Think about that headline for a moment. It suggests that 400,000,000 people will become climate change refugees flooding into Europe by 2100. How the hell is the world going to deal with an exodus like that when we can’t adequately deal with current refugees from war torn Syria? We also are incapable of dealing with the Sahel region of Africa where millions of people are dying of starvation caused by climate change and other factors such as war and the general chaos of a collapsing society.
Three years left to stop dangerous climate change warn top climate experts including the IPCCC and the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. But it will require a worldwide herculean effort the signatories emphasize by governments, businesses, citizens and scientists. Three years! As my mother often said “goodness gracious”.
“The authors, including former UN climate chief Christiana Figueres and Hans Joachim Schellnhuber of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change calculate that if emissions can be brought permanently lower by 2020 then the temperature thresholds leading to runaway irreversible climate change will not be breached”, reports Fiona Harvey of The Guardian.
Warnings over global warming have picked up pace in recent months, even as the political environment has grown chilly with Donald Trump’s formal announcement of the US’s withdrawal from the Paris agreement. This year’s weather has beaten high temperature records in some regions, and 2014, 2015 and 2016 were the hottest years on record.
But while temperatures have risen, global carbon dioxide emissions have stayed broadly flat for the past three years. This gives hope that the worst effects of climate change – devastating droughts, floods, heatwaves and irreversible sea level rises – may be avoided, according to a letter published in the journal Nature this week.
As someone who follows the climate change story relentlessly, I can say with pessimistic certainty that we will not accomplish the 2020 target necessary to stop “disastrous climate impacts” noted by the signatories of the letter. Not that we don’t have the technology to prevent the worst case scenario (we do), but that a sizable chunk of Americans believe that climate change is somebody else’s problem ( women, people of color and the poor) and that they will not be impacted. Most importantly, we lack the political will to make the changes required.
Climate change is scary to think about, it is upsetting, dicey, we have more important issues to deal with people say. Even on this site, where we are supposed to be enlightened lefties that believe in reality, some commenters cavalierly dismiss the future impacts to this country and themselves. Sorry folks, but Florida will not be the only state in this country to feel catastrophic climate impacts. And the Middle East, Africa and Asia will not be the only regions where calamity will occur.
There is now new evidence which is deepening scientific fears, advanced few years ago, that the Middle East and North Africa risk becoming uninhabitable in a few decades. FishOutOfWater, warned a couple of years ago, that in Persia and other Gulf states people will be steamed alive. It won’t be much better in the rest of the Middle East or N Africa either. Lack of potable water, drought and heat caused by our relentless fuel emissions changing the climate of the entire bio-sphere for the worst.
The Inter Press Service reports on the grim news in the middle east:
The new facts are stark: per capita availability of fresh water in the region is now 10 times less than the world average. Moreover, higher temperatures may shorten growing seasons in the region by 18 days and reduce agricultural yields a further 27 per cent to 55 per cent less by the end of this century. Add to this that the region’s fresh water resources are among the lowest in the world, and are expected to fall over 50 per cent by 2050, according to the United Nations leading agency in the field of food and agriculture. Moreover, 90 per cent of the total land in the region lies within arid, semi/arid and dry sub/humid areas, while 45 per cent of the total agricultural area is exposed to salinity, soil nutrient depletion and wind water erosion, adds the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).Meanwhile, agriculture in the region uses around 85 per cent of the total available freshwater, it reports, adding that over 60 per cent of water resources in the region flows from outside national and regional boundaries.
snip
This alarming situation has prompted FAO’s director general to call for urgent action. On his recent visit to Cairo, Jose Graziano da Silva said that access to water is a “fundamental need for food security, human health and agriculture”, and its looming scarcity in the North Africa and Middle East region is a huge challenge requiring an “urgent and massive response”. Meantime, the rising sea level in the Nile Delta –which hosts the most fertile lands in Egypt– is exposing the region’s most inhabited country (almost 100 million people) to the danger of losing substantial parts of the most productive agriculture land due to salinisation.“Competition between water-usage sectors will only intensify in the future between agriculture, energy, industrial production and household needs,” on March 9 warned Graziano da Silva.
snip
“Within this century, parts of the Persian Gulf region could be hit with unprecedented events of deadly heat as a result of climate change, according to a study of high-resolution climate models,” a Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) research said. The research–titled “Persian Gulf could experience deadly heat”, reveals details of a business-as-usual scenario for greenhouse gas emissions, but also shows that curbing emissions could forestall these “deadly temperature extremes. ”The study, which was published in detail ahead of the Paris climate summit in the journal Nature Climate Change, was conducted by Elfatih Eltahir, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at MIT, and Jeremy Pal of Loyola Marymount University.
snip
The authors conclude that conditions in the Persian Gulf region, including its shallow water and intense sun, make it “a specific regional hotspot where climate change, in absence of significant mitigation, is likely to severely impact human habitability in the future. ”Running high-resolution versions of standard climate models, Eltahir and Pal found that many major cities in the region could exceed a tipping point for human survival, even in shaded and well-ventilated spaces. Eltahir says this threshold “has, as far as we know … never been reported for any location on Earth.”