UN report: Irreversible climate change deadline

The latest United Nations’ world climate report states that greenhouse gas emissions will need to stop by 2100 or the world will face irreversible change.

The final report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) includes the findings from the three previous reports, and includes more than 30,000 independent studies about climate. The bottom line conclusion is a 95 percent accurate assessment that climate change is both real and almost entirely man-made. It also states that if greenhouse gas emissions continue unabated, the results will be irreversible. Effects will include even hotter years than the recent record setting ones, rising sea levels, agricultural disruption, and even potential changes in the male-female population ratios.

The physical changes outlined in the report won’t be the limit to the secondary societal changes. Famine and drought have already exasperated issues in parts of Africa, and rising human migration from areas affected by climate change will cause even more conflicts between nation states. The rise in heat will also cause increases in health issues.

2014 may be the hottest year on record, and if the heat trends continue, growing regions will change, causing untold potential economic disruption to traditional agricultural areas. Coastal towns and resort communities could find themselves underwater and forced to move inland to higher elevations or forcing never-ending construction of offshore breakwaters.

The primary conclusion from the IPCC report is that all countries will need to reduce, and eventually halt, use of fossil fuels and move to renewable and environmentally friendly sources of energy. And while twenty-eight European nations have agreed to reduce emissions to almost half of their 1990 levels in the next fifteen years, the United States still hasn’t even come to a political agreement between Republican and Democrats if climate change is even real.

Decisions made in the next couple of decades by politicians and citizens around the world will determine if this “irreversible” deadline in going to be met with change or if we’ll be walking into 2100 different world than we are now.