‘Severe, pervasive, and irreversible impacts’: IPCC’s devastating climate change conclusions – ‘If there is one take home point of this report it is this: We have to act now’
By Jon Queally for Common Dreams
27 August 2014 (MintPress News) – Climate change is here. Climate change is now. Climate change will be significantly more dangerous, deadly, and expensive if nothing is done to correct humanity’s course, but aspects of future shifts are probably already irreversible. That’s the assessment of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which has sent world government’s a draft of its final “Synthesis Report” which seeks to tie together previous reports the panel has released over the last year and offers a stark assessment of the perilous future the planet and humanity face due to global warming and climate change. Based on a clear and overwhelming consensus among the world’s leading scientists, the draft says that failure to adequately acknowledge and act on previous warnings has put the planet on a path where “severe, pervasive and irreversible impacts” of human-caused climate change will surely be felt in the decades to come. In a clear statement regarding the dangers of continued inaction, the draft report declares: “The risk of abrupt and irreversible change increases as the magnitude of the warming increases.” Obtained by several media outlets—including the Associated Press, The New York Times, and Bloomberg—the draft includes not new information per se, but employs stronger language and contains a more urgent warning than the previous reports from the IPCC which it attempts to synthesize and summarize. Asked for his reaction to the draft, Pennsylvania State University climate scientist Michael Mann wrote this to the AP in an email: “The report tells us once again what we know with a greater degree of certainty: that climate change is real, it is caused by us, and it is already causing substantial damage to us and our environment. If there is one take home point of this report it is this: We have to act now.” [more]
‘Severe… Pervasive… Irreversible”: IPCC’s Devastating Climate Change Conclusions
