The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) issued a bleak warning that the world is going in the wrong direction on climate change. “The climate science is clear. We are heading in the wrong direction,” WMO said in its latest report.
A new multi-agency report called “United in Science” was coordinated by the WMO. The report highlights the huge gap between aspirations and reality when it comes to climate science.
Without much more ambitious action, the physical and socioeconomic impacts of climate change will be increasingly devastating, the stark report warns.
Greenhouse gas concentrations continue to rise to record highs. Fossil fuel emission rates are now above pre-pandemic levels after the world saw a temporary dip due to Covid restrictions and lockdowns.
The ambition of emissions reduction pledges for 2030 needs to be seven times higher to be in line with the 1.5 °C goal of the Paris Agreement.
The future of the climate is bleak. The past seven years were all the hottest on record, showing that we are headed in one specific direction in global warming, and it’s the wrong one. As global warming increases, the tipping points in the climate system cannot be ruled out.
UN Secretary-General António Guterres said in a video message that the United in Science report shows climate impacts heading into the uncharted territory of destruction.
“Yet each year we double-down on this fossil fuel addiction, even as the symptoms get rapidly worse,” Guterres said.
“Floods, droughts, heatwaves, extreme storms, and wildfires are going from bad to worse, breaking records with alarming frequency. Heatwaves in Europe. Colossal floods in Pakistan. Prolonged and severe droughts in China, the Horn of Africa, and the United States. There is nothing natural about the new scale of these disasters. They are the price of humanity’s fossil fuel addiction,” he said.
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