The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has released the first installment of its latest report.
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The latest assessment finds that there is now 95 percent certainty that human activity is causing global warming.
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Key Findings
- Sea levels are likely to rise 3 feet by the end of the century if greenhouse gas emissions continue at current rates.
- The past 3 decades are the hottest since the start of the Industrial Revolution in 1850.
- In the past two decades, the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets have steadily lost mass, and glaciers are shrinking across the world.
- The concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere has increased to levels unprecedented in the last 800,000 years.
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The role of the ocean in slowing warming
While the rate of warming has slowed over the past 15 years, this should be viewed as a temporary reprieve, not a long-term trend. Ocean absorption of heat may be contributing to this slowdown.
Thomas Stocker, a co-lead on the IPCC report said, “That doesn’t mean that the ocean saves us from global warming. It means that there would be much more powerful (shorter-term) global warming if it wasn’t for the ocean.”
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Substantial Reductions
The report outlines four scenarios for warming throughout the century. There is only one scenario that prevents temperature increases from exceeding the 2C degree-threshold scientists say is manageable. That scenario is one in which carbon emissions are substantially reduced. The report states that there is a limit to the amount of carbon dioxide we can safely emit. At current rates, we’ll exceed this limit by 2040.