Sometimes world-changing pronouncements aren’t delivered on stone tablets accompanied by thunder bolts, but in densely written reports, packed with charts, footnotes and appendices.
Today's report from the UN’s climate panel is one of the latter, but it's dramatic and world-changing nonetheless: a wake up call to the world’s leaders, as well as a manifesto on how to fight climate change.
We have the technology and the money to limit catastrophic global warming, says the report, but the need to act is even more urgent than we thought. Climate models have underestimated how much we need to reduce emissions by, if we’re serious about stopping protecting the climate.
To keep the average global temperature increase below the critical 2 – 2.4 degree threshold, we need to peak in our greenhouse gas emissions within the next eight to ten years. Even the two degree increase, it says, could threaten extinction for 20 per cent to 30 per cent of the world's species.
Interestingly, this is the first of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s reports to look into the solutions to climate change in any detail. The technology already exists, it says, to fight climate change by using more renewables and improving energy efficiency with technologies like combined heat and power. It also looks at fuel-efficient cars, public transport, energy efficient lighting, improved crop and grazing land management and reducing deforestation. On nuclear power, it says (as we do) that "[s]afety, weapons proliferation and waste remain as constraints".
Between the warnings and the solutions, this report gives world leaders everything they need to act – and takes away a lot of room for slippery manoeuvring. Now it’s over to the world's governments.
