The conveniently forgotten truth

Even with global economic and political systems on thin ice, last week the world looked towards natural systems that are very literally melting away. On Monday the IPCC report concluded its work on the sixth assessment of the Global Climate Change working report.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is set up to prepare comprehensive assessment reports about the state of scientific, technical and socio-economic knowledge on climate change, its impacts and future risks, providing options for reducing the rate at which climate change is taking place. Being released in a post-COVID world, this report is regarded as the possible road map towards long term environmental sustainability.

This report using new data methods corroborated that which is already known: humans have increased the concentration of various greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and this has caused the Earth's surface temperature to increase on average by one degree Celsius. These post industrial revolution effects are what is seen through extreme weather events, be it great heat in droughts but also extreme precipitation such as through rainstorms and floods. If action is taken now decisively and with full force, potential calamities can be avoided.

Adding to previous literature, this report sets out visions of the future called shared socio-economic pathways or SSPs that represent possible societal responses to climate change. Ranging from the very optimistic rapid cutting down of emissions and carbon removal from the atmosphere later in the century, to the more realistic slow weaning off of emissions, all the way to the worst case scenario of total inaction; each of these scenarios has a variety of expected impacts associated.

Usually a phenomenon occurs in response to global warming, but the intensity of that phenomenon increases disproportionately more as global warming increases. A key finding purported is that the world warmed by three degrees will see the same changes as a world that is warmed by two degrees albeit with more intense consequences. Therefore, each additional degree of warming brings with it more extreme changes and more extreme conditions but not uniformly so in temperature changes.

Moreover, the effect is disproportionately felt world over. Some parts of the world are expected to warm by over three times the global average. Therefore, while there may be a global warming of say three degrees Celsius, some parts of the world will warm by over nine degrees.

The IPCC has developed a free to use, interactive tool allowing users to see how these effects are estimated to play out worldwide, available on its website. Variability could be pretty devastating in a warmer world, as human migration patterns adjust, a future of climate refugees is not merely dystopian.  The report also highlights among other places that the Indian subcontinent is to receive increasingly variable amounts of rainfall, a problem no amount of agricultural technology can solve.

Among the statistical insights presented, a highlighted area of this report is the possibility of irreversible changes to things that are already set in motion in the natural world through our emissions to date. These cannot be undone and range from melting ice sheets contributing to rising sea levels and further ocean warming. Ocean warming faces big inertia in the natural climate systems, with any imbalance in these radiation levels entering the atmosphere and can only be felt in the ocean in the years to come.

Recently an ice shelf about the size of Rome completely collapsed in East Antarctica within days of record high temperatures, according to satellite data. Known as the Conger ice shelf, this is believed to have an approximate surface area of 1,200 sq km scientists said on Friday.