A report released Monday from United Nations scientists is sounding the alarm over the current state of climate change. The headline in short says, “It’s just guaranteed that it’s going to get worse,” and calling this a “code red for humanity.”
Nations have delayed curbing their fossil fuel emissions for so long that they no longer can stop global warming from intensifying over the next 30 years. There still is a short window to prevent the most harrowing future according to the data, but it is another harrowing warning about human-impacted climate change.
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One of the scientists who helped write the report is Dr. Robert Kopp from Rutgers University. Kopp joined the Chad Hartman Show on WCCO Radio to discuss the findings and where we go from here.
Kopp says the findings of the report should not be a surprise to anyone at this point.
“This report reflects over 10,000 different publications since the last IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) assessment report,” Kopp tells WCCO. “The story that emerges here is one that if you've been paying attention to, shouldn't be a surprise, right? It's that we're seeing changes in the climate that are widespread, that they're rapid, they're intensifying, they're unprecedented in thousands and in some cases hundreds of thousands of years, and they're caused by human activity.”
The major takeaway according to Kopp should be an effort to get to net zero emissions. Net zero, in simplest terms, means that the amount of emissions sent into the atmosphere by humans has to be counteracted by carbon renewal processes. Examples of that include reforesting or using direct air capture and storage technology.
Kopp says until that is accomplished, the planet will continue to warm.
“These are going to keep getting worse with every increment of warming until we get to global net zero carbon dioxide emissions,” says Kopp. “The planet is going to keep warming and we're still going to be seeing more increases in heat waves, a greater increase in heavy rainfall and the like, but, if we have immediate, rapid and large-scale reductions in greenhouse gases, even the ambitious target laid out in the Paris agreement limiting warming to 1.5 degrees C is still potentially within reach. Even if we overshoot that target, we can still make ourselves a lot safer by getting to net zero sooner rather than later.”
The difficulty now becomes slowing down this warming, something Kopp says is very unlikely over the next two decades.
“Even in a world where we get on a very ambitious track, we're still likely to be on a trajectory to overshoot this one and a half degree target,” says Kopp. “But the one and a half degree target is not a magic target, right? Again, every bit of warming is making extreme events more severe, and we're increasingly able, by the way, to tie the increased intensity to the emissions as it's already happened. We are already living in a world of climate change. And the question is how much more severe are we going to make that climate change?”
For Kopp personally, his biggest contribution to the report was with sea level rise, one of the greatest areas of impact with climate change. Kopp says it is extremely dire right now with just a little continued warming.
“If we stay on target for a three degree world, or maybe around where emissions are now, we might be looking at a bit over two feet of sea level rise, most likely,” Kopp told WCCO. “Whereas if we hit the two degree target, the lower target, maybe one and a half feet (of rise). But we also substantially reduce the odds that we're going to trigger instabilities in the polar ice sheets that could lead to much more sea level rise. So under the highest emissions scenario we looked at we can't rule out seven feet of sea level rise in this century and 16 feet beyond that.”
For this specific report, Kopp says the process and data has been overwhelmingly impactful. He says it is the most up-to-date reporting on climate since 2013. Because of the amount of science and scientists from around the world involved, Kopp says there's no room for climate change denial among the leadership of the countries of the world. Kopp says they've all agreed to the findings of this report.
To the deniers of human-impacted climate change, Kopp, who has studied paleoclimate, gives a clear message. Yes, climate change is constantly happening throughout the planet’s history. However, we now have enough scientific data to know exactly how our climate has been impacted, and what those paleoclimate records teach us about our current situation. Kopp says this data literally reconstructs past changes which allows us to know that we are dealing with unprecedented change to the planet.
“They did a study of climates of the past, and paleoclimate is an important contribution to this report,” shares Kopp. “It's the first time in the IPCC report, that rather than paleo climate being sort of in its own chapter, it's spread throughout the entire report. And it's the paleoclimate record. It's the fact that climate has changed in the past, and we can reconstruct how it changes. That allows us to say things like, we are experiencing a rate of sea level rise that's unprecedented in 3,000 years. We've reached a level of warming that is unprecedented in 120,000 years. The fact that climate is changing all the time in that geology allows us to reconstruct past changes. That’s what allows us to know that we are in an extraordinary time.”
Where do we go from here? Kopp says there are ambitious plans, but it will be up to world leaders to back it up with investments and infrastructure.
“Getting to global net zero on the timeframe laid out in this report for stabilizing the climate is a very ambitious task,” he says. “The president has laid out some ambitious targets. The U.S. will aim to get to global net zero emissions by 2050. But I think that the question is going to be is, are the investments and infrastructure there to back it up, are the plans to transition away from fossil fuels while ensuring that people who are working in the fossil fuel industry have alternative good jobs to go to? Are those in place? And that that's the big challenge.”
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