Climate Change Is Going to Be a Disaster Much Sooner Than We Think

Luke Darby


A landmark U.N. report finds that we only have a few years to prevent the worst devastation.

As bad as you think the effects of climate change are going to be, you're probably wrong. And you're also probably wrong about how soon it's going to get bad. On Monday, the U.N.'s scientific panel on climate change shows that the world's window for staving off global disaster is much, much smaller than anyone previously expected. Per the New York Times:

The report, issued on Monday by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a group of scientists convened by the United Nations to guide world leaders, describes a world of worsening food shortages and wildfires, and a mass die-off of coral reefs as soon as 2040 a period well within the lifetime of much of the global population.

The report is quite a shock, and quite concerning, said Bill Hare, an author of previous I.P.C.C. reports and a physicist with Climate Analytics, a nonprofit organization. We were not aware of this just a few years ago. The report was the first to be commissioned by world leaders under the Paris agreement, the 2015 pact by nations to fight global warming.

The authors found that if greenhouse gas emissions continue at the current rate, the atmosphere will warm up by as much as 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit (1.5 degrees Celsius) above preindustrial levels by 2040, inundating coastlines and intensifying droughts and poverty. Previous work had focused on estimating the damage if average temperatures were ....

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