IPCC: “Red Code alert for the planet”, Italy calls for global action

LONDON/ROME, AUGUST 9 – It’s “red code alert” for the Planet. Global warming is progressing so fast that we will cross a crucial temperature threshold as early as 2030 – the year of the Sustainable Development Goals – up to a decade earlier than previously thought. And it’s the man’s fault for pushing the climate into “unprecedented” territory, UN scientists say in a report released today, ahead of the COP26 conference co-organized in Glasgow next Fall by the United Kingdom and Italy.

The window to avoid doomsday scenarios is very small, but something can and must be done. The UN Secretary-General António Guterres said the Working Group’s report was nothing less than “a code red for humanity. The alarm bells are deafening, and the evidence is irrefutable”. He added that “a death knell must be sounded for coal and fossil fuels before they destroy the environment.

The latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that comes at a time when, from Sardinia and Sicily to California,” the entire planet seems to be on fire. Carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere were higher in 2019 than at any time in at least 2 million years, according to the IPCC report.

The past 50 years have seen the fastest temperature increases in at least 2,000 years. The report calls the connection between human greenhouse gas emissions and global warming “unequivocal.” Reading between the lines, the IPCC says that today’s climate is already very different from the one in which modern human civilization first thrived.

“An alarming picture emerges from the latest UN report. It’s an issue that concerns all of us and every aspect of our lives,” the Italian Foreign Minister Luigi Di Maio commented on his Facebook page, “That’s why we decided to provide our country with a strategic figure in this field, a Special Envoy for Climate Change, as already done by the U.S., UK, France and Germany”, who will be  in charge of “following the negotiations and representing Italy at all international tables. The next step is his appointment, which will take place in September,” said the minister.

Compared to the first IPCC report in 1990, the new study reflects the transition of global warming from a distant issue in time to a current crisis. Warming is affecting every area of the globe, making the world an increasingly uninhabitable place. At the end of the century the increase will range from about 1.3 to 5.7°C above 1850-1900 levels, depending on greenhouse gas emissions. Sea levels will rise, in intermediate to high emissions scenarios, from about half a meter to just over a meter by the end of the century. But a rise of two meters and 15 centimeters by the year 2100, or even nearly 5 meters by 2150, “cannot be ruled out.” (@OnuItalia)