Humans should not doing enough to tackle the climate crisis, leading the world right into a dangerously dangerous and unfamiliar territory, scientists warn in a brand new study.
Of the 35 signs useful to trace changes in climate, 20 are showing record extremes, including measurements related to Earth’s average surface temperatures, fossil fuel subsidies, sea ice levels and global forest cover.
Before 2000, global average temperatures were never 1.5 degrees Celsius higher than pre-industrial levels — in 2023 alone, 38 days have already exceeded that threshold, scientists found. July of this 12 months was the warmest month, in keeping with the brand new report, perhaps previously 100,000 years.
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As only one example, the record temperatures, driven by human activity and worsened by recurring climate patterns often called El Niño, are shrinking sea ice in Antarctica at an alarming rate — this 12 months, the continent witnessed its lowest ice levels on satellite record.
The increasingly devastating impacts of climate change have also caused wildfires to be at their worst in Canada this 12 months. The country witnessed the scorching of a staggering 45 million acres of land — the previous record-holder is 1989’s season when 19 million acres were charred
The impacts of climate change weren’t limited to the Americas; in truth, the crisis is even affecting regions not typically vulnerable to climate extremes, the report found. This 12 months, northeastern China suffered from exceptionally severe floods that displaced greater than 1,000,000 people. Heavy rains caused a glacial lake to burst its banks within the Indian state of Sikkim earlier this month, flushing away bridges and roads. A robust Mediterranean storm washed away entire neighborhoods within the Libyan city of Derna. These are only a number of examples, scientists emphasize.
“Life on our planet is clearly under siege,” study co-author William Ripple, an ecologist at Oregon State University, said in a statement. “The statistical trends show deeply alarming patterns of climate-related variables and disasters.”
“We also found little progress to report so far as humanity combating climate change,” he added.
Humans are pushing Earth systems into “dangerous instability,” scientists say. By the top of this century, they believe a couple of third to a half of the world’s population — three to 6 billion people — could also be pushed beyond the “livable region,” in that they might experience severe heat and limited food availability.
Humanity is demanding an excessive amount of from Earth, and politicians must urgently fight for policies that address this demand, as such an effort “will give us our greatest shot at surviving these challenges in the long term,” scientists write in the brand new study.
This research is described in a paper published Tuesday (Oct. 24) within the journal BioScience.