It was alarming to read in today's Washington Post that climate researchers now predict the planet will warm by 6.3 degrees Fahrenheit by end of the century, even if the world's leaders fulfill their most ambitious climate pledges, a much faster and broader scale of change than forecast just two years ago.
Rober Corell, who chairs the Climate Action Initiative and reviewed the UNEP report's scientific findings, said the significant global temperature rise is likely to occur even if industrial and developed countries enact every climate policy they have proposed at this point. The increase is nearly double what scientists and world policymakers have identified as the upper limit of warming the world can afford in order to avert catastrophic climate change.
Achim Steiner, UNEP's executive director has said, "With every day that passes, the underlying trends that science has provided is...of such dramatic nature that shying away from a major agreement in Copenhagen will probably be unforgivable if you look back in history at this moment. He noted that since 2000 alone, the average rate of melting at 30 glaciers in nine mountain ranges has doubled compared with the rate during the previous two decades.
Other findings include the fact that sea level might rise by as much as six feet by 2100 instead of 1.5 feet, as the IPCC has projected, and the Artic may experience a sea-ice summer by 2030, rather than by the end of the century.
We face a situation now where everybody has to do everything they can do.