While the United Nations won’t be publishing the report until Nov. 2 in Copenhagen, Bloomberg has got its hands on a 127-page draft that is subject to a line-by-line review. That document includes a 32-page summary and reads like something out of the Old Testament in its apocryphal suggestions of a very changed world that cannot be undone.
Global warming: Scary stuff
Despite global warming deniers suggestions to the contrary, the report says that global warming is already affecting “all continents and across the oceans,” and without a serious reduction in greenhouse gasses the world faces a “severe, pervasive and irreversible impacts for people and ecosystems.”
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“Without additional mitigation, and even with adaptation, warming by the end of the 21st century will lead to high to very high risk of severe, widespread, and irreversible impacts globally,” the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said in the draft.
“Risks from mitigation can be substantial, but they do not involve the same possibility of severe, widespread, and irreversible impacts as risks from climate change, increasing the benefits from near-term mitigation action,” the authors wrote.
The report is peppered, or even over-seasoned, with the words “risk,” “vulnerable” and “irreversible” especially when it comes to crop production, rising sea levels, melting glaciers and more pervasive heatwaves.
Ice melting and temperature rising
The report doesn’t believe its possible to stop the
melting of larger ice sheets on the poles or in Greenland and says that this could see the sea rise by as much as 7 meters (23 feet) which would affect coastal cities nearly everywhere.
According to the report, the surface air temperature will rise somewhere between 0.3 degrees to 4.8 degrees this century depending on what policies are enacted by world governments.
“Many aspects of
climate change and associated impacts will continue for centuries, even if anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases cease” the researchers said. “The risk of abrupt and irreversible change increases as the magnitude of the warming increases.”
The researchers seem pessimistic about keeping temperature increases below 2 degrees suggesting that in order for that to happen the world will need to conquer “substantial technological, economic, social, and institutional challenges.”
The study leaked today, called the “Synthesis Report” is essentially a summary of three reports that the UN has authored since September 2013. It is designed to make the risks of doing nothing abundantly clear while using simple language to lay out its case to lawmakers worldwide. Over 800 scientists from around the world have helped write the four reports something the United Nations did last in 2007.
