[D66] Climate change reports warn of a world on the brink

[A.OUT]

wsws.org:

Climate change reports warn of a world on the brink
12 August 2019

Last week’s reports from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change and the World Resources Institute point to the increasing
risk of a climate change-induced environmental catastrophe inflicting
untold suffering on billions of people.

The UN report, “Climate Change and Land,” demonstrates that 821 million
human beings already suffering from hunger face starvation as the land
on which they depend for sustenance loses its ability to support
agricultural infrastructure. These men, women and children are part of a
broader 3.2 billion people who are living in areas that will be eroded,
flooded, turned into deserts or destroyed by wildfires, hurricanes or
cyclones in the coming decades.

The World Resources Institute’s Aqueduct project reports that 17
countries in the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia, comprising a
quarter of the world’s population, are in peril of using up their
available fresh water. This “Day Zero” scenario would cause droughts
that are four times as costly as floods—destroying crops, causing power
outages, increasing the risk of preventable diseases and potentially
causing mass migrations of hundreds of millions of people, stressing
water supplies in even more parts of the globe.

There is no doubt that global warming caused by the burning of coal, oil
and natural gas for over a century has led to these social crises. The
transformation of arable land into desert, the disappearance of coastal
areas resulting from rising ocean levels, and the sinking of cities due
to the melting of permafrost have all been linked in hundreds of studies
to climate change. These are part of broader processes that have
produced more intense heat waves in the past decade and more rapid
melting of glaciers.

Such trends are in line with numerical predictions made as early as
1896, which showed that burning fossil fuels and the resulting release
of carbon dioxide would warm the planet’s surface. This was reflected in
a 1912 newspaper short from New Zealand asserting that the two billion
tons of coal being burned every year were adding about seven billion
tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, which “tends to make the air a
more effective blanket for the earth and to raise its temperature.”

These early estimates of greenhouse gas emissions have been verified and
updated every year since 1958, when the measurement station at Mauna Loa
Observatory in Hawaii began recording a continual increase in the
concentration of carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere. Like
clockwork, the release of more and more greenhouse gases into the
atmosphere has preceded a rise in the planet’s average global
temperature, a trend that has been escalating since the 1980s.

Of greater concern in the modern era is the fact that Earth’s climate is
entering a qualitatively different stage. For the past half century,
humanity’s industrial activity has rivaled geophysical processes in its
influence on the changes in the Earth’s environment. An article
published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the
United States (PNAS) titled “Trajectories of the Earth System in the
Anthropocene” warns that the current shifts in the Earth’s climate are
poised to accelerate.

Global warming, the study predicts, is feeding into other geophysical
processes that aren’t directly related to carbon dioxide emissions, such
as the mass release of methane from permafrost melting. This convergence
threatens to produce a “Hothouse Earth,” where global warming quickens
and is no longer directly related to the burning of fossils fuels. Such
a scenario would be exponentially more difficult for modern scientific
techniques to contain.

The consequences of such a development would be catastrophic. The
extreme weather events of the past decade would be only the precursors
of much more devastating storms, longer heat waves, dryer droughts and
nonstop wildfires. Coral reefs across the world would die, eliminating
significant parts of the food chain. Glacial melting and sea level rise
would flood every coastal city on the planet, home to approximately one
third of the world's population, potentially drowning billions of
people. At least one million of the Earth’s species would die and
continent-scale portions of the world’s surface would become uninhabitable.

The PNAS report is one of many published in the past decade calling for
the reorganization of the world’s energy production and transportation
infrastructure and the development of new technologies to immediately
halt carbon emissions. Such data has not stopped US President Trump from
slashing climate research by various federal agencies by up to 84
percent in his proposed budget for fiscal year 2020.

[...]