Beware! Global Warming speeding up, threatening lives of billions of people, say scientists

tech.hindustantimes.com:

The breakneck speed of global warming exceeds the pace of efforts to protect billions of vulnerable people, according to a new report released Monday by the world’s top climate scientists. The report warns of a growing mismatch between rising temperatures and slow, fragmented efforts to adapt, leaving little time for catching up before “a brief and rapidly closing window of opportunity” is sealed shut.

“With fact upon fact, this report reveals how people and the planet are getting clobbered by climate change,” said UN Secretary-General António Guterres, calling the 3,500-page document “an atlas of human suffering” and an indictment of a “criminal” “abdication of leadership.” To underscore the challenges to global cooperation, Russia’s military invasion of Ukraine will likely overshadow the first major report in nearly eight years on climate change and vulnerability. 

This is the second doorstop document released in less than six months from the United Nations-backed Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), with two additional reports expected before the end of the year. Researchers in the latest volume focused on the unpreparedness of nations to cope with climate instability and compounding stressors from higher temperatures, now at 1.1° Celsius above pre-industrial levels. 

Choices made in the next decade will determine how much hardship we can avoid. Warming beyond that level “would cause unavoidable increases in multiple climate hazards,” the authors write. Clawing temperatures back down after passing 1.5°C — an extremely tall task — would still leave potentially irreversible damage. 

The war in Ukraine unexpectedly pushed into the two-week meeting at which national delegates to the IPCC from 195 countries