Pointed to Pakistan\u2019s monumental floods and China\u2019s crop-withering heatwave
\nNEW YORK
\nHumanity is \u201cgoing in the wrong direction\u201d on climate change due to its addiction to fossil fuels, the UN said Tuesday in an assessment showing that planet-warming emissions are higher than before the pandemic.
\nThe UN\u2019s World Meteorological Organization and its Environment Programme warned catastrophes will become commonplace should the world economy fail to decarbonize in line with what science says is needed to prevent the worst impacts of global heating.
\nThey pointed to Pakistan\u2019s monumental floods and China\u2019s crop-withering heatwave this year as examples of what to expect.
\n\u201cFloods, droughts, heatwaves, extreme storms and wildfires are going from bad to worse, breaking records with alarming frequency,\u201d said UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres.
\nThe UN warned last month that the drought gripping the Horn of Africa and threatening millions with acute food shortages was now likely to extend into a fifth year.
\n\u201cThere is nothing natural about the new scale of these disasters. They are the price of humanity\u2019s fossil fuel addiction,\u201d said Guterres.
\nThe UN\u2019s United in Science report underscores how, nearly three years since COVID-19 handed governments a unique opportunity to reassess how to power their economies, countries are plowing ahead with pollution as normal.
\nIt found that after an unprecedented 5.4 percent fall in emissions in 2020 due to lockdowns and travel restrictions, preliminary data from January-May this year shows global CO2 emissions are 1.2 percent higher than before Covid-19.
\nThis is largely down to large year-on-year increases in the United States, India, and most European countries, the assessment found.
\n\u201cThe science is unequivocal: we are going in the wrong direction,\u201d said WMO Secretary-General Petteri Taalas.
\n\u201cGreenhouse gas concentrations are continuing to rise, reaching new record highs. Fossil fuel emission rates are now above pre-pandemic levels. The past seven years were the warmest on record.\u201d
\nLast week the European Union\u2019s Copernicus climate monitor said that summer 2022 was the hottest in Europe and one of the hottest globally since records began in the 1970s.
\nTuesday\u2019s report said there was a 93 percent chance that the record for the hottest year globally \u2014 currently, 2016 \u2014 will be broken within five years.
\nIt warned the continued use of fossil fuels meant the chance of the annual mean global temperature temporarily exceeding 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels in one of the next five years was roughly even (48 percent).
\nKeeping longer term temperatures below 1.5C is the most ambitious goal of the 2015 Paris Agreement.
\nDespite more than three decades of UN-lead negotiations, rich polluters show little sign of being willing to make the kind of swingeing emissions cuts that would keep the 1.5C goal in play.
\nThe UN\u2019s Environment Programme, in an update to its annual \u201cemissions gap\u201d assessment following new pledges made at last November\u2019s COP26 summit in Glasgow, said Tuesday that even these promises were far from adequate.
\nIn fact, it said the ambition even in countries\u2019 most recent pledges would need to be four times greater to limit warming to 2C, and seven times higher to make 1.5C.
\nAll told, current worldwide climate policies put Earth on course to warm 2.8C by 2100, UNEP said.
\nGuterres said that Tuesday\u2019s assessment showed \u201cclimate impacts heading into uncharted territory of destruction.\u201d
\n\u201cYet each year we double-down on this fossil fuel addiction, even as the symptoms get rapidly worse,\u201d he said in a video message.
\nTasneem Essop, executive director of Climate Action Network, said that the forthcoming COP27 climate conference in Egypt needed leaders to agree to new funding to help communities in at-risk nations rebuild after extreme events. \u201cThe terrifying picture painted by the United in Science report is already a lived reality for millions of people facing recurring climate disasters,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Pointed to Pakistan\u2019s monumental floods and China\u2019s crop-withering heatwave NEW YORK Humanity is \u201cgoing in the wrong direction\u201d on climate change due to its addiction to fossil fuels, the UN said Tuesday in an assessment showing that planet-warming emissions are higher than before the pandemic. The UN\u2019s World Meteorological Organization and its Environment Programme warned […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":178840,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[10620,85,650],"class_list":{"0":"post-283247","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-top-news","8":"tag-climate-impacts","9":"tag-united-nations","10":"tag-world"},"yoast_head":"\n