(CNN) – As the world battles historic droughts, landscape-altering wildfires and deadly floods, a landmark report from world scientists says the window is rapidly closing on reducing our dependence on fossil fuels and avoiding catastrophic life-transforming changes such as we know it.
The report of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) says the world has rapidly warmed 1.1 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, and is now plummeting toward 1.5 degrees, a critical threshold by which world leaders agreed that warming must remain below to avoid a worsening of the impacts.
Only by making deep cuts in greenhouse gas emissions, and at the same time removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, can we stop the precipitous trend.
“The bottom line is that we have zero years left to avoid dangerous climate change, because it is already here,” Michael E. Mann, lead author of the 2001 IPCC report, told CNN.
Unlike previous assessments, Monday’s report concludes that it is “unequivocal” that humans caused the climate crisis and confirms that “widespread and rapid changes” have already occurred, some of them irreversibly.
That’s partly due to the dizzying rate at which the planet has been warming recently, faster than scientists have previously observed. Since 2018, when the panel released a special report on the importance of 1.5 degrees, greenhouse gas emissions have mostly continued unabated and global temperatures have risen.
Even in the most optimistic IPCC scenario, in which global emissions start to drop dramatically today and drop to net zero by 2050, global temperature will still peak above the 1.5 degree threshold before falling.
In a statement, UN Secretary General António Guterres called the report “a code red for humanity” and noted that the 1.5 degree threshold is “dangerously close.”
“The only way to prevent this threshold from being exceeded is to urgently intensify our efforts and follow the more ambitious path,” Guterres said.
The IPCC report comes just three months before the UN-led international talks on climate change, during which world leaders are expected to strengthen their commitments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Although some countries have promised tougher cuts since the 2015 Paris Agreement, many have missed deadlines to do so and there is still a significant gap between what leaders promise and what is needed by 2030.
“From a scientific perspective, every grade, every part of a grade, every half grade is important in terms of limiting the impacts that we will see from climate change,” Ko Barrett, former IPCC vice president, told CNN. “So whatever level countries decide they are looking for, there are benefits and consequences to choosing those limits.”
Dave Reay, director of the Edinburgh Institute for Climate Change, said world leaders “must have the findings of this report etched in their minds” at the November conference and take urgent action.
“This is not just another scientific report,” Reay said. “This is hell and high water in a big way.”
As computing power increases, scientists are more confident than ever in connecting the dots between the climate crisis and extreme weather, which for some regions, even with 1.1 degrees warming, is already becoming unbearable.
Michael Byrne, a climate researcher at the University of Oxford, said that what is different about this report is that “the effects of global warming are no longer in the distant future or in remote corners of the world.”
“We knew what was coming and now it’s here,” Byrne said.
A heat wave that killed hundreds this summer in the northwestern United States and British Columbia would have been “virtually impossible” without the climate crisis, the researchers found. It made the devastating rains from Hurricane Harvey three times more likely to occur and 15% more intense, the scientists said. Harvey dumped more than 19 billion gallons of water into Texas and Louisiana in 2017, causing devastating flooding in the Houston area.
A man rushes to evacuate sheep from a raging forest fire in Turkey on August 2.
The IPCC says that heavy rains that used to occur once every 10 years now occur 30% more often.
Globally, droughts that may have occurred only once every 10 years or so now occur 70% more frequently, according to the report. The connection to climate change is particularly strong in the western United States, which is experiencing a historic multi-year drought that has depleted reservoirs and caused water shortages.
Amid relentless drought and record heat, wildfire seasons are now longer and result in more destructive fires. Six of the 10 largest fires in California occurred in 2020 or 2021, according to CalFire.
“We’re seeing really scary fire behavior. I don’t know how to overstate that,” said Chris Carlton, supervisor of the California Plumas National Forest supervisor, who called this year’s wildfire season “uncharted territory.”
Charles Koven, lead author of the report’s chapter on global carbon cycles, said California has already reached a tipping point in wildfires.
“I don’t think we knew where that threshold was until we crossed it,” he told CNN. “What the report makes clear is that the probability of crossing any of these tipping points will certainly increase the more warming we see.”
With every fraction of a degree of warming, the effects get worse. Even limiting warming to 1.5 degrees, which countries in the Paris Agreement determined was ideal for avoiding the worst impacts, the types of extreme weather the world has experienced this summer will become more severe and more frequent.
Beyond 1.5 degrees, scientists say the climate system could start to look unrecognizable.
Andrew Watson, a scientist at the University of Exeter, said the climate models used in the report do not capture the risk of “low probability, high impact” events that become more likely as global temperature increases.
“These are events like the collapse of the ice sheet, sudden changes in ocean circulation, or catastrophic wildfires,” Watson said. “These ‘known unknowns’ are even scarier.”
The roughly 3,500-page report is the culmination of nearly a decade of climate research by scientists around the world. And while the IPCC is considered the leading source on climate change, it tends to be conservative in its findings because of the way it plays out, having hundreds of scientists come to consensus not only on the research, but also on the language that describes it.
However, Monday’s report uses the strongest wording to date to describe the climate crisis. The ice sheets are melting and will continue to melt; extreme floods from higher sea levels will continue to be more frequent; and the sea level itself will continue to rise well into the 22nd century, simply because of the amount of heat that the oceans have already trapped.
As scientists sound the alarm, the International Energy Agency says human carbon emissions “are on track to increase by 1.5 billion tons in 2021, the second-largest increase in history, reversing most of it. from last year’s decline caused by the covid-19 pandemic. “
The IPCC report is clear in stating that world leaders must cut greenhouse gas emissions now, before deadly and costly climate extremes get even worse. But Barrett said a key message in the report is that the most serious impacts can still be prevented.
“It really requires unprecedented transformational change, a rapid and immediate reduction in greenhouse gas emissions to zero by 2050,” Barrett said. “The idea that there is still a way forward is a point that should give us some hope.”
CNN’s Angela Dewan, Brandon Miller, and John Keefe contributed to this report.
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