Only ‘system change’ can avert catastrophic climate change, warn scientists
By Nafeez Ahmed
If the world is to have a serious chance of limiting global warming to the internationally-agreed 2℃ limit this century, the transition to renewable energy should happen much more rapidly than current efforts, according to a new study in the journal Science.
The study, by scientists at the universities of Manchester, Sussex, and Oxford, and published on September 22, finds that to meet their carbon emission pledges under the Paris Agreement, governments around the world need to trigger rapid, simultaneous changes across key sectors like electricity, transport, heat, industrial, forestry, and agriculture.
Without this “rapid and deep decarbonization,” the paper concludes, we won’t be able to reign in the projected growth in global carbon emissions quickly enough. Scientists agree this would inevitably tip the planet’s climate system into dangerous global warming.
The stakes are high.
A business-as-usual scenario would see an acceleration of extreme weather; the loss of most of the world’s coral reefs; the disappearance of major mountain glaciers; the total loss of the Arctic summer sea-ice, most of the Greenland ice-sheet and the break-up of West Antarctica; acidification and overheating of the…
