IPCC Report: Global Warming Crisis Could Come As Early As 2030

The new IPCC report issued in 2018 is "quite a shock, and quite concerning." said Bill Hare, an author of previous I.P.C.C. reports and a physicist with Climate Analytics, a nonprofit organization. In 2016, the IPCC accepted an invitation to analyze the impact of 1.5 °C above the industrial level instead of 2 °C. The new report is contributed by 91 authors from 40 different countries, citing more than 6,000 scientific researches and included a total of 42,001 expert and government review comments. The report not only summarized the fact that human activities had already caused approximately 1 °C increase in global temperature but also pointed out something that scientists were not aware of a few years ago - that crisis may come sooner than people had expected.

The report found that global warming is likely to reach 1.5 °C between 2030 and 2052 if continued at the current rate. Moreover, unlike the previous report, which focuses on the environmental impact after hitting the 2 °C mark, this report shows that many of those impacts would come much sooner, before hitting the 2 °C level. 

A 32-page summary of the complete report can be found at the link (https://report.ipcc.ch/sr15/pdf/sr15_spm_final.pdf). Below we provided a few highlights of the report: 

1) Many land regions and seasons experience higher than the global average increase in temperature, some may be 2-3 times higher than that of the Arctic. 

2) Coral reefs would decline by 70-90 percent with global warming of 1.5°C, whereas virtually all (> 99 percent) would be lost with 2°C. 

3) Evidence collected from extreme areas where global warming has already occurred by 0.5 °C supports that detectable changes will come should we continue at the present greenhouse emission rate.

4) Based on the study of 105,000 species, a global warming of 2°C is projected to result in 18% of insects, 16% of plants and 8% of vertebrates losing over half of their climatically determined geographic range, more than double the impact of that of 1.5°C.

The report also pointed out that in order to limit global warming to 1.5°C, the world needs to adopt "rapid and far-reaching" changes. Although these changes are technically feasible, they are politically unlikely to happen.

Find out how much hotter has your hometown became after you were born? https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/08/30/climate/how-much-hotter-is-your-hometown.html?module=inline 

Reference:

https://www.ipcc.ch/news_and_events/pr_181008_P48_spm.shtml

https://report.ipcc.ch/sr15/pdf/sr15_spm_final.pdf 

https://www.carbonbrief.org/in-depth-scientists-discuss-key-findings-of-the-ipccs-special-report-on-1-5c

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-climate-change-emissions/greenhouse-gas-emissions-gap-wider-than-ever-u-n-report-idUSKCN1NW1MQ

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/07/climate/ipcc-climate-report-2040.html