Climate change poses an “existential threat” to life on Earth, a group of scientists warned on Tuesday in a report analyzing extreme weather events in 2023 and the lack of political action.
The study, published in the journal BioScience, examined 35 planetary ‘vital signs’, such as carbon dioxide (CO2) pollution, energy and meat consumption per capita, deforestation due to fire or days of extreme heat.
Of the 35 indicators analyzed, 20 would reach record levels in 2023, the group of scientists concluded.
“Indeed, we are shocked by the ferocity of the extreme weather events in 2023. We have entered uncharted territory, which scares us,” they wrote.
Although 223 is on track to be the hottest year on record, entire regions have suffered deadly heat waves, storms and floods, and sometimes one catastrophe after another.
As for the oceans, temperatures have been “completely out of order” for months, without scientists being able to fully explain what is happening, underlined Johan Rockström, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Change Research (PIK, an acronym in German).
To these scientists, the finding is unappealing: “Life on Earth is under threat.”
As we face this threat, not only have greenhouse gas concentrations reached an all-time high, but fossil energy financing has also increased sharply.
“We must change our position on the climate emergency, which is not an environmental problem, but a systemic and existential threat,” said the document, published a month before the 28th United Nations Conference of the Parties (COP28). United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, in Dubai.
The most ambitious goal of the Paris Agreement – limiting the increase in global average temperature to a maximum of 1.5 degrees Celsius (ºC) compared to pre-industrial times – must be measured over several years to be achieved. are considered.
But this limit could already be exceeded annually, warned William Ripple, the study’s lead co-author, paving the way for a vicious cycle of increasing warming, such as the melting of the polar ice caps, the disappearance of forests, the thawing of carbon sinks from frozen areas, the extinction of corals…
“Once these tipping points pass, they could change our climate in ways that will be difficult, perhaps impossible, to reverse,” this University of Oregon professor warned.
“We will no longer be able to avoid some turning points. We must try to reduce the wear and tear of the impact,” Tim Lenton of the University of Exeter added to AFP, recalling the need to drastically reduce greenhouse gas emissions. . This is because “every fraction of a degree [centígrado] counts and the game is not over yet.”
The document also warned that three billion to six billion people could be “outside the world’s habitable zone” by the end of the century.
Source: DN
