The IPCC has issued its five year update on climate change with some stark warnings - again - saying humanity has reached a “critical moment in history”.
They say the world has all the knowledge, tools and financial resources needed to achieve its climate goals, but after decades of disregarding scientific warnings and delaying climate efforts, the window for action is rapidly closing.
They warned that the world’s plans to combat these changes are inadequate and that more aggressive actions must be taken to avert catastrophic warming.
The 2018 plan to limit warming to 1.5oC above preindustrial temperatures within a decade just won't be achieved. They fear that beyond that threshold climate stresses will become increasingly unmanageable that people will not be able to adapt. Basic components of the Earth system will be fundamentally altered. Heat waves, famines and infectious diseases could claim millions of additional lives by century’s end, they say.
Calling the report a “how-to guide to defuse the climate time-bomb,” UN boss Guterres announced an “acceleration agenda” that would speed up global actions on climate.
Emerging economies including China and India, which currently don't plan to reach net zero until 2060 and 2070, respectively must drastically speed up their emissions-cutting efforts alongside developed nations, Guterres said.
Both the UN chief and the IPCC also called for the world to phase out coal, oil and gas, which are responsible for more than three-quarters of global greenhouse gas emissions.
In 2018, the IPCC found that a 1.5oC world is overwhelmingly safer than one that is 2oC warmer than the preindustrial era. At the time, scientists said humanity would have to zero out carbon emissions by 2050 to meet the 1.5-degree target and by 2070 to avoid warming beyond 2 degrees.
Five years later, humanity isn’t anywhere close to reaching either goal.
Despite its stark language and dire warnings, the IPCC report sends a message of possibility, said Friederike Otto, a climate scientist at Imperial College London and a member of the core writing team for the report.
“It’s not that we are depending on something that still needs to be invented,” she said. “We actually have all the knowledge we need. All the tools we need. We just need to implement it.”
In many regions, the report says, electricity from renewable sources like solar and wind is now cheaper than power from fossil fuels. Several countries have significantly reduced their emissions in the past decade, even as their economies grew. But they are all only developed European countries which import food (and did their climate-damaging efforts decades earlier) - except the one non-EU country in this group, the US. New analyses show how efforts to fight climate change can benefit society in countless other ways, from improving air quality to enhancing ecosystems to boosting public health. These “co-benefits” well outweigh the costs of near-term emissions reductions, even without accounting for the long-term advantages of avoiding dangerous warming.
This latest update focuses less on agriculture, more on coal and oil, perhaps in a shift that recognises the food security issues involved.
Today's released Synthesis Report is based on the content of the three Working Groups Assessment Reports: WGI – The Physical Science Basis, WGII – Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability, WGIII – Mitigation of Climate Change, and the three Special Reports: Global Warming of 1.5°C, Climate Change and Land, The Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate.
The AR6 report has contributions from three New Zealanders; Bronwyn Hayward in the core writing team, Jared Lewis as a contributing author, and Andy Reisinger on the scientific steering committee. They are the only local voices out of 126 overall contributors, weighted towards those in or from Europe.
34 Comments
No, this is not a concern at all. The radioactivity in the water has been reduced to well below the levels accepted in drinking water.
The average river discharging water into the ocean from Japan, China, or any of the surrounding countries, is likely to be more polluted than this treated water.
http://nuclearsafety.gc.ca/eng/resources/health/tritium/tritium-in-drin…
Health Canada recommends 7,000 Bq/L as the maximum amount of tritium in drinking water.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/feb/15/fukushima-japan-ins…
“By the time the liquid is diluted with seawater, tritium levels will be at less than 1,500 becquerels per litre, or 1/40th of the government standard for discharging water into the environment,” he said.
This is a non-story hyped up by people who don't care about science.
Because as we see with COVID, science is not the only thing that matters. Governments have to take public perception into account, as well as science, when they make decisions.
Even though this water could be safely disposed of in the way you are suggesting, the public perception is that it's a risk - even when the science says it isn't. There's nothing to be gained for the government by going against public perception, even if they have science on their side. Again, you only need to look at the global response to COVID to see this is true.
Furthermore, the solution to pollution is dilution. We're talking about 1.3 million cubic metres of water held in storage tanks, by comparison Sydney Harbour has 500 million cubic metres of water in it. Disposing of the treated water into the pacific ocean - which is a fair bit bigger than Sydney Harbour - dilutes it to such a degree that any radioactive isotopes (and again, it has been treated to be safer than drinking water standards) will not pose any danger to anyone.
Every man for his tribe/extended family. ""Dunbar's number is a suggested cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships—relationships in which an individual knows who each person is and how each person relates to every other person. This number was first proposed by anthropologist Robin Dunbar, who found a correlation between primate brain size and average social group size. By using the average human brain size and extrapolating from the results of primates, he proposed that humans can comfortably maintain 150 stable relationships.""
50 years of climate models and not one 'expert' has got it right. Catastrophic warming, sea level rises (London underwater by 2020 was a good one), anything to promote fear. The masses are now indoctrinated into the Global Warming (whoops I mean Climate Change) by the government sponsored media, which now only shows weather events around the world, that have been happening since the creation of earth. Gone is the Covid scam where a good dose of body bags shown in New York, scared the wits out of 'Team NZ'. Never mind 300 people die every day in NY, most with no hope of a burial.
The experts did get it right. About 20 years ago I read an IPCC summary with the scientist predicting a roughly 1.5C increase with a fairly large margin of error and they said there was a 15% chance that it might be far worse and a 5% chance that nothing would happen. However it was not the experts who reported on TV and in newspapers. Every dumb journalist converts each weather event into climate change disaster. A classic example of 'cry wolf'; just when the public has learned to distrust all the predictions that is when the apocalypse will occur.
If you actually look at this stuff, you will see the experts, even Hansen from 50 years ago, were and continue to be surprisingly accurate. If anything, they under did the effects as most meta studies show.
Its a complex system, they aren't going to be bang on ever.
We don’t generally change behaviour as a individual until the cost to benefit ratio inverts. Much as we in NZ are being forced into climate change mitigation and adaptation measures based on recent weather events. The latest report also says “Guterres also called for developed countries to phase out coal by 2030, and all others by 2040. He called for no new licensing or funding of oil and gas projects, based on the findings of the International Energy Agency that all new oil and gas development must cease for the world to limit global heating to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels.‘ Advice which is being ignored currently. Any continuation of our current levels of consumption and therefore lifestyle in NZ must be compromised when the price of imported fossil fuels becomes prohibitive. Which could still be many decades in the future.
Think it through: money is spun into existence as debt, on a bank computer. It is 'loaned' out (a scam, when you think about it) and someone has to do work - using energy - to 'pay it back'. That means that you cannot 'value' energy in $; it has to be the other way around. I had that wrong in 2005-8, and - like Goldman Sachs, anticipated $200/barrel oil. Actually, it cannot happen (unless via unrepayable debt followed by collapse). Restrict the energy available, and you reduce the repayment ability. We are now in a cleft stick; we cannot afford the next oil source; the establishment Capex doesn't stack up. But even at that level, global society is going into more debt, and infrastructure is decaying faster than it is being fixed.
I suspect the upper repayability/affordability limit is less than $100/barrel in 2008 USD.
And that means now - not many decades from now.
Sarc aside, the giveaway word is: Record.
I sail, and I watch both ocean surface temperatures, and atmospheric pressures. I can tell you, folk like me - it's life and death to us - reckon the rule book is being re-written. The speed with which a storm can get to Cat3 or Cat5, is scary now - all because of the heat energy in the oceans (which for a while acted as capacitors for the atmosphere - no longer).
As far as I can recall, EVERY trend is ABOVE prediction - in other words, is happening faster. Not surprising, given the political need to water-down.
But there are still some flat-earthers out there.
Several countries have significantly exported their emissions, not reduced. If they had truly reduced we would have likely turned a corner. Instead they have got China to build their carbon intensive products and then blamed them for their emissions. China might be the biggest player here, its the biggest emitter but is severely ramping up its renewable energy mix, now exceeding 30% of their electricity and rising fast. As opposed to around 21% in the US, whose emissions have "dropped".
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