by WorldTribune Staff, October 14, 2018
The recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report shows that current global warming “could actually extend to an existential threat to human civilization on this planet as we know it,” former Vice President Al Gore declared.
In the IPCC report, 91 authors and editors from 40 countries concluded there’s currently a 12-year window to make “far-reaching and unprecedented changes” to avert dramatic effects of global warming.
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said the report should be an “ear-splitting wake-up call to the world” as “it confirms that climate change is running faster than we are – and we are running out of time.”
Gore told PBS in an interview aired on Oct. 12 that “the earmarks of this latest storm… are worth paying attention to.”
“Hurricane Michael intensified as it reached the coast. And that’s something relatively new,” he said. “And the reason for it is, the ocean waters are much warmer than normal, so it’s not getting cold waters churned up to weaken the storm. It just keeps on getting stronger.”
“Even without hurricanes, we get these so-called rain bombs that just devastate the places where it falls,” he said. “…Hurricane Florence and Hurricane Harvey just stayed in place for days and days and days. That’s something new too.”
“And it’s because we’re beginning to see the disruption of wind currents, along with ocean currents. And so the Northern Hemisphere jet stream that normally moves these storms out to the east is getting loopier and wavier and sometimes disorganized. So this is really serious stuff. We have a global emergency. And you use a phrase like that, and some people immediately say, OK, calm down, that it can’t be that bad. But it is.”
The IPCC report said that to keep warming at 1.5 degrees Celsius global net emissions of carbon dioxide would need to be cut by 45 percent by 2030 and be “net zero” by 2050. Guterres said “billions of trees” must be planted and coal phased out by 2050.
When asked about scientists who don’t support the IPCC climate conclusions, Gore dismissed them as “a few outliers.”
“You still have some people who say the Earth is flat and not round, but you don’t give them equal time and saying some people say round, some people say flat,” he added.
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