The world is in “uncharted territory.”
Off the Charts
The Earth simply can’t stop setting new heat records.
Global surface temperatures have soared once again, The Guardian reports, making March the tenth consecutive hottest month on record. Over the last 12 months alone, global temperatures have persistently been more than 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, putting us squarely in “uncharted territory.”
Put differently, we’ve already surpassed the levels stipulated by the Paris Climate Agreement — at least for the time being — in an alarmingly abrupt progression that’s even caught environmental scientists by surprise.
Niño Doubt
Some scientists are still hoping that recent soaring temperatures could be chalked up to the El Niño weather pattern, a recurring meteorological phenomenon that breaks the regular wind patterns, resulting in unusually warm weather every two to seven years.
Unfortunately, the effect isn’t even enough to account for the persistent rise in global temperatures.
“If the anomaly does not stabilize by August — a reasonable expectation based on previous El Niño events – then the world will be in uncharted territory,” NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies director Gavin Schmidt noted in a recent article for Nature.
“It could imply that a warming planet is already fundamentally altering how the climate system operates, much sooner than scientists had anticipated,” he added.
Emission Control
As always, the solution would be simple, if we could actually do it: radically decrease global greenhouse gas emissions.
The worst offenders behind the destruction of our planet, as recently compiled in the Carbon Majors Database, include just 57 industrial and state entities that accounted for the lion’s share of emissions. Many are investor- and state-owned oil companies.
With ocean surface temperatures continuously setting new records and quite literally spiking off-the-charts, scientists are desperately trying to come up with meaningful ways to address the looming disaster.
To University College London geophysical and climate hazards professor Bill McGuire, a good start would involve educating the masses, even though nobody wants to be confronted with a truly horrific prognosis.
“The bottom line is that many things in life are scary or worrying, from going to the dentist to noticing a potential sign of cancer, but ignoring them almost invariably results in something far worse happening down the line,” he wrote in a recent opinion piece for CNN.
And “climate change is no different,” he added.
More on climate change: Scientists Discover the Villains Destroying the Planet
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