Earth enters "era of boiling"

SGGP July 31, 2023 09:35

United Nations (UN) Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has called for urgent action to combat climate change, stressing that record temperatures in July showed the Earth had moved from a warming phase to a “simmering era”.

Children play in water during an unusual heatwave in Europe. Photo: The Guardian

Heats up too quickly

According to the World Meteorological Organization and the European Union (EU)'s Copernicus Climate Change Monitoring Service, this July could be recorded as the hottest month in world history and could be the hottest month "unprecedented" in thousands of years.

Mr. Guterres expressed concern as the intense heat across the Northern Hemisphere in a severe summer, making July this year the hottest month on record. He also stressed that climate change is here, causing serious impacts and this is just the beginning. The extreme impacts of climate change are in line with predictions and a series of warnings from the scientific community. However, the speed at which this phenomenon is happening is astonishing. In the face of this alarming reality, Mr. Guterres reiterated the call for rapid and far-reaching action, especially to minimize the use of fossil fuels.

Ahead of the Climate Summit scheduled to take place in September, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres called on developed countries to commit to achieving carbon neutrality by 2040 at the earliest and for emerging economies by 2050. He stressed that instead of despairing about the negative impacts, humanity needs to act urgently to prevent the worst consequences, turning a scorching year into an ambitious one. The President of the 28th Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP28), Sultan Al Jaber, also called on the Group of 20 leading developed and emerging economies (G20) to play a pioneering role in efforts to mitigate climate change.

Action needed now

Global warming will far exceed the 1.5 ^° C limit. But governments have yet to implement policies to ensure they meet the goals of the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change, said Jim Skea, the new chairman of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), in an interview with Reuters. Explaining his assessment, Mr. J. Skea said that if governments just stop at current plans, global temperatures would rise by nearly 3 ^° C compared to pre-industrial levels.

The new IPCC Chair said that in order to achieve the goals of the Paris Agreement, governments need to implement strong and swift policies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. This is the time for governments to deploy their policy tools, such as greater investment in renewable energy such as wind and solar power, and end investment in fossil fuels. The new IPCC Chair also said that the world will need to develop more technological solutions to capture and store _CO2 , to reduce greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming.

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