Climate crisis: Alarm over overheating, new UN report

For the climate crisis that planet Earth is experiencing, scientists do not exclusively see carbon dioxide as responsible for overheating and urge the containment of another powerful greenhouse gas – methane – as the planet’s best hope for preventing catastrophic global warming. Methane and CO2, they say, heat the atmosphere, but the two greenhouse gases are not equal.

Countries must make “strong, rapid and continuous reductions” in methane emissions in addition to reducing CO2 emissions, scientists warn. Globally, methane emissions account for about 30% of warming since the pre-industrial era, according to the United Nations.

The situation is worse than we thought and is deteriorating faster than we feared, the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change points out in its new report.

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Global warming could reach a limit of +1.5 degrees Celsius around 2030, ten years earlier than estimated, threatening new “unprecedented” disasters for humanity, already hit by successive heat and floods.

Extreme heat waves, which were previously hit once every 50 years, are now expected to occur once a decade due to rising temperatures, while downpours and droughts have already become more frequent.

This first in seven years, adopted on Friday by 195 countries and drawing on data from more than 14,000 scientific studies, examines five scenarios for greenhouse gas emissions, from the most optimistic – some consider it utopian – to the worst.

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the planet is expected to reach the limit of +1.5 degrees Celsius compared to the pre-industrial era around 2030. Ten years earlier than previously estimated by the Intergovernmental Conference in 2018.

Also, by 2050, the increase is projected to continue well beyond this threshold – which is one of the key limits of the Paris Agreement – even if the world manages to greatly reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

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Although global temperatures have so far only risen by 1.1 degrees Celsius, the world sees with its own eyes the consequences that are already occurring. Even more so this summer, with images of fires affecting the western United States, Greece or Turkey, flooding in regions of Germany and China or the thermometer reaching 50 degrees Celsius in Canada.

While we will have to halve CO2 emissions by 2030 to stay at +1.5 degrees Celsius, all eyes are now on Glasgow, where world leaders will meet in November.

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