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The UN’s Climate Warning Is Far Worse Than You Think
The reality of 2.9 degrees of climate change is harrowing.
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Published in
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8 min read
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2 days ago
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A recent UN report has found that we are on course for 2.9 degrees Celsius of global warming by the end of the century. This figure shouldn’t come as a surprise, as several highly regarded studies have all independently come up with the same figure. However, the timing of this report makes it all the more impactful, as COP28 is approaching fast. Our window for stopping irreversible and devastating climate change is shrinking incredibly fast. As such, COP28 might be the last chance the international community has to halt this self-made apocalypse. But 2.9 degrees is just a number with no real context. It can be challenging to grasp what such a future actually means for the planet and for you. So what exactly is the UN warning will come to pass? And how can we tackle such a global disaster?
The climate is a complex web of interlinked environmental systems. As such, there are a plethora of sometimes contradictory effects of global warming that I would struggle to summarise in a single article. But, in the context of 2.9 degrees of global warming, I can talk about climate tipping points, which happen at a given level of global warming and can’t be undone, and generalised impacts, such as how much crops are affected per degree of global warming. This will give you an accurate enough understanding of the consequences of this report without getting too bogged down in the details.
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So, what climate tipping points would be triggered by 2.9 degrees of climate change? I will save the best for last…
Well, the first obvious one is ice loss. The Greenland Ice Sheet, West Antarctic Ice Sheet and the Barents Sea Ice will all collapse and melt away, along with most of the world’s mountain glaciers. These events can be triggered by only 2 degrees of global warming, which we have just hit. Once this ice has disappeared (which will take several years), global sea levels will surge by 0.6 meters. This might not sound like a lot, but 8 of the 10 biggest cities in the world would become flooded and uninhabitable. Moreover, hundreds of millions of…
